


A Summer of Two Months

by rundownes



Category: Toaru Kagaku no Railgun | A Certain Scientific Railgun, Toaru Majutsu no Index | A Certain Magical Index
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/F, Gen, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-16 03:09:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 28,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29943597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rundownes/pseuds/rundownes
Summary: Here is your resolve. You’ll save them, no matter how many times it’ll take, no matter what it’ll cost you, even if you might not be human by the end of it.
Relationships: Misaka Mikoto/Shirai Kuroko, Shirai Kuroko/Shokuhou Misaki
Comments: 28
Kudos: 41





	1. 1

**1.**

Your name is Shirai Kuroko. You are thirteen years old and attend the prestigious Tokiwadai Middle School in the School Garden. Of the 2.3 million inhabitants in Academy City, you are one of eight Level 5 espers, the strongest supernatural ability users in the city, albeit by and far you are ranked as the weakest of the eight. Your best friend is Misaka Mikoto, also a Level 5 esper, the 3rd ranked known widely as Railgun. 

What is not as widely known is the fact that you have been pretty much in love with Misaka Mikoto for months now. In the beginning the two of you had struck up an intense rivalry—there are three Level 5s that attend Tokiwadai and it felt a little like the proverbial pond could only hold so many big fish—but the two of you quickly discovered that you actually liked spending time together and you could bond over certain experiences no one else could understand. Also, Mikoto beat you in fights so many times and so soundly you basically had no choice but to look up to her and respect her. The more you got to know her, the more you realized how smart and kind and brave she was, too.

Mikoto does know how you feel towards her. You’ve always been upfront with her about the sincerity of your feelings. But she’s always been a little uncertain, a little hesitant, a little thrown off. _I don’t want to ruin a good thing,_ she says, referring to your friendship. _Can I have some more time to figure out I feel?_ She’s yet to outright reject you, so for now, you hold out on a tentative hope. You give her space when she asks for space, you’re careful not to seem overzealous when talking to her, even though sometimes it feels like you can barely hold back your overflowing feelings. You’re willing to wait, there’s time, for now you’re content to just be able to spend time with her.

Mikoto is an Electromaster, meaning she has mastery over electricity and magnetism. You’re a teleporter, which means, well, that you can teleport. Currently, the maximum range over which you can teleport an object is 500 meters, the maximum weight 500 kilograms, but where you really excel and stand out is in your teleportation cooldown, or the amount of time you need to spend between successive teleportations working on 11-dimensional calculations. It’s always been that as your ability improves you experience a marked decrease in your teleportation cooldown. From 1 minute between teleportations when you first unlocked your ability to 1 second when you cracked Level 4 and then to a respectable 0.1 seconds upon reaching Level 5. For some time after you reached Level 5, you put your main focus on improving the maximum weight and range of your teleportations, believing those to be your primary weaknesses and the more practical applications of your power, but it wasn’t long afterwards that you hit your current plateau which you find you can’t seem to get past no matter how what you try. Still, to your surprise, your teleportation cooldown continues to decrease steadily. Your calculations continue to get faster.

One lazy summer afternoon, you’re rounding up some delinquents that have been harassing street goers as part of your regular Judgement duties, when your earpiece abruptly crackles with Uiharu’s warning cry. You whip around just in time to see a thug that you somehow overlooked pulling the trigger of a 9mm pistol, the muzzle kicking back with a brilliant flash of light and recoil in his hand. It’s only after you’ve teleported behind him and subdued him in a chokehold that you realize your teleportation cooldown has decreased once again. Estimating a muzzle velocity of 400 m/s and 20 meters between where you originally stood and the thug in the alleyway, it had taken you at most 0.05 seconds to complete the necessary calculation to teleport yourself out of the way the fired bullet.

Afterwards at Joseph’s, you share this detail with your friends. The reactions of each of them vary. Uiharu, your partner at Judgement, is still just relieved that you managed to escape the close call unscathed. Saten, a schoolmate of Uiharu’s, congratulates you and slaps you on the back, joking with you not to leave a Level 0 like her even more behind in the dust. Mikoto looks at you with an expression you can’t entirely read, perhaps at once both wary and thoughtful. As you and Mikoto walk back to the Tokiwadai school dorms, watching the sunset, she says to you, “At this rate you really might overtake me soon, huh Kuroko?”

“I can only hope that happens,” you say, jokingly, and there’s the familiar bzzt of her power, reaching out to shock you. You teleport out of the way with ease, flicking her forehead and receiving a light shock anyways (this is how banter between the two of you typically goes), and you ask, “Does the idea really bother you that much?”

“No, of course not,” Mikoto crooks a grin, and holds her arm out to flex a bicep. “I mean, it’d be nice to finally get some decent competition going around here, for one thing.”

“How you wound me! Arrogance doesn’t suit you,” you faux-lament. “If only all your admiring fans knew what the Railgun was really like. Stubborn, prideful, and childish.”

“Says _you_ , but I’m still older than you, remember? You have to respect me,” Mikoto says. Then she looks down the street length-wise, slinging her bag above her head as she does a lazy cat stretch. “I guess I’m just surprised you’re not celebrating more. I think it’s impressive. Really. I’m proud for you.”

“It’s simply not that big of an accomplishment, in my opinion, compared to what you can do,” you say. Then, you smile. “But thank you for the kind words. I appreciate it.”

Mikoto scratches her cheek and flashes another grin at you. You’re tempted to blurt out something overly sentimental and romantic and swoop in for a big dramatic kiss but it’s not always that you want to ruin the moment, especially not when she looks so comfortable. Sometimes, it’s just nice to know that there’s somebody like her who cares about you. And although she may never come to return your feelings the way you want her to, you tell yourself that it’s okay, that it’s alright, as long as you can stay by her side. As long as she’s happy.

One month later, they find Railgun’s body in the switchyard in School District 17. You’re with Uiharu when the news comes in over Judgement’s channels in the middle of the night. The distance separating Judgement Branch Office 177 and the switchyard in District 17 is over 5 kilometers and it takes you 0.4 seconds to make the ten teleportations necessary to traverse it.

The two Judgement officers who made the call shriek when you flash in front of them on scene. You brandish your armband and ask them with a calmness you don’t feel to show you the body they say they found. The place is too peaceful, you think. There are no signs of a fight, you think. No lightning scorch marks, no burning holes from arcade coins, the power in every nearby building is still on. As you make yourself consider rationally about what must have happened, the panic in your stomach starts to settle down, and you’re thinking about what a funny little story this will be to tell Mikoto later when she comes back from whatever late night excursion she’s been out on again, and you’re also beginning to feel a little bit annoyed at these officers for wasting your time, don’t they know that Railgun is _Railgun,_ that what they described is a statistical impossibility. Worst case scenario, there actually is a dead body, but it’s just a case of mistaken identity because of how green they are. You can feel a headache forming in the back of your skull as you consider the number of cases you have to get back on, the mountains of paperwork you still need to fill out, lately there’s been a string of research facilities across the city that have been vandalized by unknown assailants, and you really wish Mikoto would talk to you when she’s been so oddly distant lately, but she promised you this is the last time she’ll be out so it’s the last time, you’ll see her later, definitely, you step around the corner of a giant box of metal freight into an open-ish area shining cleanly and clearly under the moonlight and the distant Academy City lights and you open your mouth to scoff to speak to say _see I knew it_ and you see—

You see—

It’s a closed casket funeral.

You’ve never met Mikoto’s mother before, and the only thing you can think about when you see her is how alike they look. How Mikoto will be so beautiful when she grows up and becomes a full-fledged lady. Uiharu has been nonstop crying for a week and Saten is obviously holding back tears as well and suddenly everyone is looking at you and you realize that as her best friend and the person she was closest to you’re expected to make a speech. You make your way up to the podium. You clear your throat, straighten your posture. You hate this, how the entire school has shown up, the entire world, you scan the crowd and that’s goddamn _Shokuhou Misaki_ right there in the corner, too, they’ve made this into a goddamn state thing, a propaganda thing, when anyone with two brain cells who attends Tokiwadai knows that Railgun and you hate Mental Out’s guts, just as much as Mental Out hates the two of you. And then Mikoto’s mother at the front is looking at you and you meet her eyes and whatever words you might have been about to say just dry up in your throat because oh wait oh right Mikoto is never going to get to grow up and grow old is she. Because she’s dead.

“Sorry,” you say, not sure who you’re apologizing to, and teleport away.

You spend whole days locked in your once-shared room, skipping classes, skipping meals, sleeping on her bed wrapped in her blanket, trying to commit how she smells to your memory. There’s no friendly lightning shocks anymore, no competitive but encouraging banter, when you wake up. 

You become a Gekota expert. You look up every single figure in Mikoto’s not so secret collection and find to your surprise that they’re actually worth something. Who knew it wasn’t just a childish hobby? You waste hours studying the keychain on her school bag, the garish green of her Gekota-themed phone, which she left behind on that night she never came back from, and sometimes it still lights up and pings whenever you call or message it with yours.

You open her wardrobe and you find those ridiculous shorts she always insists on wearing under her skirt. You find her arcade coins and hairpins. You try on her uniform because why not. You start to forget how she smells. You find your old journal entries and you read the words _oh I think I might really be in love with this girl._

You find photo albums and you see her smiling face next to yours and suddenly you can’t stand to think about her at all. This has to stop. Your friends are all worried sick about you. Despite being a Level 5, you’re on the verge of losing your scholarship and the school is threatening to kick you out for refusing to participate in anything. You change your lockscreen. You box up her things and put them in a storage locker on the far side of the city. You try to burn the photo albums but Uiharu catches you in the act and slaps you flat across the face.

“I know you’re hurting, we all are,” Uiharu says, her voice breaking. “But this isn’t how to do things, Shirai-san.”

You throw yourself back into your Judgement work. You were always well known before but now you gain a new edge of notoriety for your brutal takedowns. It’s not hyperbole that your district singlehandedly experiences a double digit percentage decrease in crime because of your feverish, nonstop work. You know this isn’t what Uiharu meant, but you can’t bring yourself to care. If you let yourself get even a single moment to breathe, you’ll have to think about what it means to breathe, to exist in a world which she no longer exists in. 

You lose weight. You catch criminals. Your teleportation gets faster. It gets to the point that you don’t even have to process the calculations anymore, they just happen automatically, like you’re a machine. You feel like a machine. When you teleport in rapid succession, it seems time around you slows to the point of stopping. How ironic: when you move, the world stops. And when the world moves, you stop.

And the world moves, and moves, and moves, and it never stops moving, leaving only you behind.

This has to stop.

This has to stop.

When does it stop?

It never stops.

As much as you try not to think of her, how can you possibly not think of her every single day. You were never able to get an answer from Mikoto about your feelings. Those stupid useless feelings that went absolutely nowhere, and yet they still persist in you even now, unwavering, more strongly and intense than they had ever been.

You miss her so much.

You can’t do this anymore.

“I can’t believe I’m the one who has to tell you this,” Shokuhou Misaki says, gloved hand running through her long blonde hair. The two of you are standing at the rooftop of a building where you once shared a moment with Mikoto, after you were forced to teleport the two of you away from a certain vending machine she had decided to roundhouse kick. “But this isn’t going to change anything, you know. She’s gone.”

Shokuhou Misaki says, “Do you think she really would have wanted you to die because of her? Do you think she’ll really be happy to see you there in the afterlife, if such a thing even exists?”

Shokuhou Misaki says, “There’s a reason Railgun had to die. A reason she couldn’t tell you nor anyone about what she was doing. The best thing you can do for her memory is to move on.”

Shokuhou Misaki says, “I guess I have no choice but to—”

You slap the remote out of her hand. It’s not difficult, you can move yourself ridiculously fast because of your teleportation. “Fuck _you,_ ” you hiss, through your clenched teeth, feeling an aching, hot pressure building up behind your eyeballs, ready to burst any second, “fuck you, how fucking dare you, I _hate_ you.” And then you’re screaming, you’re shrieking, a sound is tearing up out of your throat like a banshee’s, everything is pouring out like an unstopped dam. “I hate you! I hate you! It’s not fair. Why her? Why not you? A reason she had to fucking die? _Don’t give me that bullshit, Shokuhou!_ ”

Your voice rings and rings in your ear. There’s the distant clattering sound of the remote hitting the far below pavement and breaking into pieces. Shokuhou Misaki looks at you with her unreadable, starry eyes. “Feel any better now that you got that out of your system?” she says, sweetly. God. You _hate_ her.

“Yes,” you say. You take a long, deep breath, trying to calm your breathing, you exhale out an equally long and shuddering breath, and then you vault over the railings and into the open air and start to fall. You think maybe you hear someone shouting at you from above.

You fall.

The ground rushes up to meet you, and you can only hope that it won’t be painful.

You—

* * *

It’s a lazy summer afternoon, and you’re standing in the shadow of an alleyway. What just happened? One second, you had been falling, about to hit the ground, you had been about to die, and the next, you’re standing here, alive and well. You had teleported yourself to safety, you realize, a surge of white hot anger pooling in your gut, you had teleported yourself to safety completely and utterly without intending to at the very last moment. There’s only one explanation for how something like that could have happened, and that’s that damned Shokuhou Misaki must have done something to you with her powers after all, she must have tampered with something in your mind with one of her other remotes, forcibly preventing you from killing yourself. She has the ability to mess with minds like that, being the strongest psychic esper in the city, the third Level 5 who attends Tokiwadai. The audacity of that girl, you think, burning with a righteous fury. You’ll teleport yourself into the ground the next time if you have to, you’d like to see her try and stop you from doing that.

Before you can work yourself up to enacting your newfound plan, however, abruptly, something in your ear crackles. Your hand jumps to your ear in shock and for some reason, that’s _Uiharu’s_ voice coming through now, a warning cry. “Shirai-san! Behind you!” 

You turn around on instinct just in time to see a familiar man pulling the trigger of a 9mm pistol, the muzzle kicking back with a brilliant flash of light and recoil in his hand.

Huh. Why is this scene so familiar? Déjà vu. You could’ve sworn—

The bullet hits you solidly in the stomach.


	2. 2

**2.**

When you wake up, it’s to the white ceiling of a hospital room. For a moment, you don’t remember what happened. Then it all comes rushing back to you. The building. Trying to kill yourself. Reappearing in that alleyway, somehow, hearing Uiharu’s voice in your ear, getting shot. Blacking out afterwards.

You try to sit up and grimace. Though you must be doped on painkillers, by god does it _hurt_ like a bitch. Your entire torso lances in pain. Ow. Any chance that you might’ve thought this is only the figment of some weird dream is thoroughly disabused by the sheer reality of the pain.

“Kuroko!” someone says. “You’re awake! How do you feel?”

There’s the sound of an ECG monitor skipping two entire beats. 

“Mikoto…?” you whisper. No. This has to be a dream after all. That voice can’t be hers. It’s impossible. At the switchyard in District 17, what you saw—

You turn your head slowly, not wanting to be disappointed, not knowing if you can survive the disappointment. Mikoto smiles at you beatifically from the chair at your bedside, the worry and relief clear on her face. “Geez,” she says, and it’s really her voice, _it’s her voice, it’s her,_ “you know, you gave us all such a—”

Whatever more she’s about to say is cut off by the ugly sob that rips itself out of your chest. The next thing you know you’ve teleported out of your bed and are embracing her, as tightly as you can, your arms wrapped around her back, feeling how solid and warm and real she is pressed against your body, your best friend, the most important person to you in the world, feeling the steady rhythm of her heart even as your own goes crazy in your chest. Your face is buried in the crook of her neck. You’re holding her. You’re never going to let her go. 

If this is a dream, then you can only hope you never wake up from it.

“K-Kuroko!” There’s a bzzt of electricity, a zap of lightning, and that familiar feeling of being shocked only makes you pull all the tighter against her. She’s taken aback, stuttering. “A-Are you serious? Right now? Get off, there’s people—”

The ECG monitor has flatlined as all the electrodes have fallen off your body with your teleportation. A bunch of nurses and doctors frantically burst into the room only to stop when they see you clinging to a very much alive and well, embarrassed and confused Misaka Mikoto.

“...Hey,” she says in a quieter voice after a while, the bzzt of her power having dissipated. You feel her finally reciprocate your hug, tentatively putting her arms around you, and you dissolve into a fresh round of tears. “Why are you crying?”

“I—” you try to speak but the act makes your entire body spasm with pain. You cry out a little, involuntarily, and she stiffens, but screw it if you’re going to let something as stupid as a gunshot injury stop you. You were being serious about never letting her go. “Mikoto…”

“You’re bleeding,” she says, in alarm. “Kuroko, your wound—”

“Don’t leave me,” you manage to say. Your breath hitches in your throat. “Please don’t leave me. Don’t leave me. Promise me you’ll never go.”

“I really don’t understand what’s gotten into you all of a sudden,” she says. Then, after a while, she says, softly, “I promise.”

“Say it again. Please.”

“I promise.”

Finally, the nurses and doctors are able to pry you from Mikoto’s body and force you into the bed. There’s a giant stain down the front of her Tokiwadai uniform, it turns out she hadn’t been lying about your bleeding. You’ve torn open your injury.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she says. She reaches over to take your hand, squeezes it. “See, I’m right here, aren’t I?”

They’re pumping a new round of sedatives and painkillers into you, probably trying to get you to calm down. Your heart is still going crazy in your chest, and you can faintly hear something about having to redo the surgery. You focus on the feeling of your hand in hers even as everything starts to go dark.

“I love you,” you say, what you wish you had had the chance to say, back then, before.

“I know,” she says, sounding just the tiniest bit sad, and squeezes your hand again.

* * *

The next time you wake up, it’s to Uiharu and Saten at your bedside. Uiharu’s the one who bursts into tears now, who reaches over to give you a loose embrace.

“I should have been paying more attention,” Uiharu sniffs. “It’s my fault. If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t have gotten hurt so badly.”

“It’s okay, I don’t blame you. Where’s Mikoto?” you ask worriedly, anxiously, hands curling tight on the bedsheet the second Uiharu lets go of you. You want to climb out of bed right that instance to go look for her. 

“Woah there, lovebird,” Saten says, reaching over to stop you from moving. Her voice is gentle but belies her undercurrent of concern. “Slow down. You’re the one who ate the bullet to your stomach.”

“Where is she?”

“She went home to get some sleep. She was here for more than twelve hours straight watching over you. Don’t worry. She’ll be back to visit tomorrow. She’s the one who saved you, in the alley, if she hadn’t gotten to you in time…”

You chew your lip but nod. You won’t be fully reassured until you can see her again. The implications of Saten’s words work their way deep into your bone—Mikoto was the one who saved you. She saved you, and she stayed by your side, all that time. All of a sudden, you feel embarrassingly fragile, like you’ve revealed something about yourself that had remained utterly secret up until this moment. How much you truly, deeply love that girl. Another thought strikes you, something that has been nagging at you for some time now, and you ask, “Say, what’s the date?”

“You were out for two days,” Saten says. Then, she answers your question.

You blink once, twice. Did you mishear her? The impossibility of your situation hits you like a truck. July 22nd. It’s a full one month before the switchyard in District 17. But as much as it’s unbelievable, though, even as your mind quickly jumps onto analyzing your situation from every possible angle, you have to admit that taking things at face value seems to be the only way of making sense of things. Time travel? you think, then grimly and silently conclude to yourself, time travel. Somehow, that last teleport right after you had jumped off the building, right before you hit the ground, had brought you into the past. It had put you in the alleyway on that lazy summer afternoon, when the thug had tried to shoot you and you had dodged the bullet, discovering that your teleportation cooldown had once more significantly decreased, and you had gone to Joseph’s afterwards with your friends to celebrate. Except this time, as you had watched the man pull the trigger, you had been in much too much shock to properly react, and the bullet had struck you, and there had been no celebration at Joseph’s. Instead, you learn, you had been rushed to the hospital. It was pretty dramatic stuff. At one point your heart had even stopped.

Uiharu and Saten must take your reticence for tiredness because they’re happy to fill the air with aimless conversation while you wrestle with the implications, the possibilities of what’s happened. If this _really_ is the past, you think, feeling your chest swell with hope for the first time in forever, then you have a chance to redo everything. You have a chance to save Mikoto’s life. You sure as hell aren’t going to waste it.

The hospital discharges you in three days, and the first thing you do is place an anonymous tip to Judgement and Anti-Skill explaining everything you know about the Level-Upper and Kiyama Harumi, the events that had preoccupied you in July. With that unpleasant business out of the way, you devote yourself to figuring out how exactly you’re going to save your best friend’s life.

In the original timeline of the future (it feels a little odd thinking about it like that, but for now, it’ll do), no matter how much you had pressed and interrogated and dug, no matter what favors you tried to call in, after the fact, there had been a big hush-hush on the Railgun’s untimely death. The top brass of Academy City had gotten involved, the superintendent himself had cracked down on the matter, shuttering every possible file and lead with deep encryption not even Uiharu could get past. That was one of the reasons you hadn’t been able to get closure over Mikoto’s death, the why of it, the _how_ of it, the senseless irrationality of it. Conspiracy theories abounded. The only people known to the public who had seen her body had been you and those two first Judgement members, and even as you were plagued by nightmares of it night after night, in your waking hours day after day, you hadn’t been able to make any sense of it.

Back in the original timeline, you had been seriously considering breaking into the Windowless Building and confronting the Board Chairman himself to get the answers you wanted, when Shokuhou Misaki suddenly inserted herself into your life with an infuriating brazenness, stopping you from carrying out any of those plans. As you recall the matter of your failed suicide and her interference there, too, a scowl makes it’s way across your face, which gradually disappears into a contemplative frown. In a way, you are only living now in this wonderful past where Mikoto is still alive because of her actions. Did she somehow, however impossibly, know this would happen? No, that’s beyond the scope of her powers, surely? Even if she manipulated you into saving your own life at the last second, as far as you know, though, this is entirely of your own power. Somehow, by an unknown mechanism, you teleported yourself into the past.

You cautiously practice your teleporting and discover that you are running up against a hard limit of 0.05 seconds per teleportation. That’s the fastest you can compute your calculations. Is your body now the same one as your body from the original timeline? It isn’t, right, it’s your past body, right? But the speed at which you can calculate your teleportations should depend solely on your calculating abilities, and since your mind feels like the one from the future, shouldn’t that mean you should be able to do your calculations at the same speed as in the future as well...? A couple days pass, and you discover the limit of your ability has gone down to 0.045 seconds, and you realize that your cooldown is decreasing at the exact same rate as it had in the original timeline. That’s odd. Do you have some kind of internal timer fixed to your brain, counting down?

You’re hardblocked for information on the net. No matter what you search nor how thoroughly you search, you can’t catch any hint of anyone making designs to take Railgun’s life. You even enlist Uiharu’s help, risking seeming like a paranoid overprotective friend in the process, and she also finds nothing. You still can’t fathom what kind of person is capable of killing someone like Mikoto. With you, being the weakest Level 5 esper, you could understand how someone could kill you, but with her... Maybe it’s not a person at all, but some kind of machine…? That train of thought and investigation unfortunately leads you to nowhere.

With no other choice, you take to following Mikoto around everywhere she goes as a method of making sure she’s safe. At first, she seems surprised. Then, she seems disconcerted. You’ve always been a little bit clingy because of your feelings, but this is a whole magnitude more than usual, and you know she's the kind of person who values her independence.

“You’ve been acting weirdly ever since you got shot,” Mikoto knits her eyebrows. “Are you sure you didn’t hit your head back then?”

“I can’t help it!” you say, fixing a painfully fake grin that she somehow isn’t able to see through. “You saved my life, so now I owe you. Can’t you put yourself in danger or something so I have the chance to save your life back and wipe the slate clean? It’s not a fun feeling being in someone’s life debt.”

“I don’t have any plans to do something like that anytime in the future,” she says, crosses her arms, “well, not that I know of, at least… I’m not that reckless.”

“Aw, how disappointing. Well, I’ll just have to keep following you until something happens, then.”

“I know I made a promise to you,” she says, looking away and blushing slightly here, and the expression makes you melt, “but I didn’t mean literally we would _never_ be apart. That’s just way too much, okay, Kuroko? You know that I still need time to think about things. About us.”

“Oh, how you break my tender, maiden heart! But I get it. I’m sorry that I made you feel uncomfortable. I’ll be here if you need me.”

So as to not push her away, you begin to slightly relax your constant surveillance on Mikoto. It’s true, after all, you still have three weeks until the switchyard at District 17, more than enough time to figure out the details and just enjoy being with her again. More days pass, and slowly, slowly, you begin to relax even more. Things started to go wrong, you think, when Mikoto started going out at night, in the middle of August, without giving you any word or explanation. It’s logical to assume that that’s when she got tangled up in whatever had eventually led to the circumstances of her death.

You give a wide, wide berth to Shokuhou Misaki of the past. The last thing you need is her rooting through your mind and figuring out all kinds of nonsense that even you yourself haven’t been able to make heads or tails of yet. You haven’t told anybody that you’re from the future. Not only do you think no one would believe you (Mikoto is already concerned about a potential head injury), but you don’t want to do something drastic like inadvertently cause a time paradox or something like that, nor do you want to make any of your friends needlessly panic, and you also don’t want to potentially tip off any hypothetical nameless enemies about what you know if there are in fact hypothetical nameless enemies to tip off.

As each day passes better than the one before, everything going blissfully and perfectly, you start to wonder if it had all been a dream, after all. That the whole thing about this ‘future’ where your best friend had died had been nothing more than one long nightmare, a delusion cooked up by your fever addled-mind in the aftermath of getting shot. Once in a while, you’ll touch the bullet scar, and wince.

Then the day comes when Mikoto comes home late, slightly battered and staring blankly at the wall, shrugging off all your attempts to talk to her, and you realize with a tinge of horror that it hadn’t been a nightmare. It was real. And now it was happening all over again, it was at last upon you, and it was up to you to stop it.

She tries to sneak out again the next night, but you’ve gotten a lot better at trailing her without her noticing you. Your teleportation truly comes in real handy for surveillance work, and any time she thinks to check behind her, you’ve already teleported yourself somewhere far out of sight.

You witness her destroy a research facility, and although somewhere deep down you had always suspected the destruction of the research facilities had been connected to her due to the nature of the electrical fires, something in you is nevertheless stunned to see the firsthand confirmation. You are a Judgement officer. You have always stood on the right side of law. But it’s not like you can arrest your best friend, even if that might have been the lawful thing to do. She has to have a good reason for her actions.

Paying more attention this time around, you notice the papers she stows away in Kill-Bear. Later that night, when she is in the shower and you have pretended to have stayed behind in the dorm the whole night, you are able to retrieve the papers from the giant stuffed animal without problem. 

That is how you learn about the Level Six Shift Project, Accelerator, and the existence of 20,000 clones destined to die.

* * *

“Why didn’t you tell me?” you throw the papers onto the table between the two of your beds when Mikoto emerges from the shower, so there can be no doubt about what you’re talking about. There’s a horrible lump in your throat that won’t go down no matter how much you swallow. The truth of the situation is worse than your wildest imagination could have conceived.

Mikoto looks surprised one second, then afraid, then at last, angry. “Did you go snooping through my things?” she demands.

“You should have told me,” you say, moan. You can see the image of the switchyard in District 17, you can see it, at last you have a face for the nameless evil villain, someone to blame for what happened, but it doesn’t make you feel any better. If anything, it makes you feel infinitely worse. Oh, god. It’s the _Number One Level 5 Esper in Academy City,_ it’s _Accelerator._ “Why didn’t you tell me?”

You pace the length of the dorm. You run your hands through your hair, trying desperately to breathe, realizing you are about to have a panic attack. In your mind’s eyes, you can see Accelerator ripping apart Mikoto with his cruel, callous hands, with the same hands that have already ripped apart _ten thousand of her clones,_ if you’re math is right. You want to throw up, who are you kidding. You’re math is definitely right, it’s right. You’ve never been bad at doing calculations.

“It wasn’t any of your business!” Mikoto snaps. Her palms tighten into fists. “I wanted to keep you out of it. It’s not safe for you to get involved.”

“Not safe? Not safe for _me?_ ” you say, unable to keep the edge of hysteria out of your voice. You spin around, jabbing a finger at her. “How can you even say that, when you were the one who—” you clamp your mouth shut. 

She misunderstands, she thinks you’re talking about something else. “You don’t know the people behind this,” Mikoto says, with a hint of a plea to her voice now, “they’re dangerous, more dangerous than anybody we’ve ever faced. It’s not that I don’t trust you, or that I don’t think you’re strong, but this conspiracy, it stretches through every inch of this damn city, like a parasite. It’s my responsibility to stop them! Mine and mine alone!”

“Don’t be arrogant! You’re just one person, too,” you snap. “I don’t care, you can’t go through with this.”

“What?”

“You can’t go through with this, I won’t let you go through with this,” you repeat. “You have to stop. You can’t go and fight Accelerator. I won’t let that happen.”

There’s a moment of silence, where she’s speechless. Then the anger comes back in her voice, tenfold, and the air bzzts with the electricity of her power as she can’t control herself.

“I know I can’t fight Accelerator,” she says, darkly, “but I’m not going to just stand by and do nothing, not as long as these experiments are still going on. I’m my own person. You don’t get to decide what I do or don’t do.”

“They’re just _clones_ ,” you say, desperately. “They’re not even—even real _people_. Why can’t you just forget about them and move on?”

“They’re not real people? Forget about them? Kuroko. I never knew you could be this selfish,” Misaka says, coldly. “Are you really going to try and stand in my way, too?”

“I’ll do whatever it takes,” you say, “to keep you safe.”

There’s a moment of silence, and then you’re reaching for your Judgement thigh straps, you’re reaching for the white spikes.

Sometime later, you wake up lying on your back in the dorm room, alone. Your whole body aches with electrical burns, groans in pain, as you pick yourself up. Mikoto is gone. She’s probably not going to come back. Your fight with her, you think, if it can even be called that, was entirely one-sided. Damn it! What good is being able to teleport _fast_ when you’re literally the most useless Level 5 that ever existed.

But it’s okay, you still have time to convince her. You’ve read enough of the papers and know enough about the future to know what facilities she’ll target next. And if you can’t convince her, then you’ll just have to figure out a way to stop Accelerator yourself. The hopelessness and desperation from last night is still there, but with it there’s a certain determination now, too. You fucking travelled back in time to save your best friend. Stop panicking. You’re Shirai Kuroko, even if you’re rather useless, you’re still a Level 5. You can do this.

_Kuroko. I never knew you could be this selfish._

Tears prick at your eyes. You force them back. You add apologizing to her onto the list of things you’ll have to do. You limp for the door, but then it swings open in front of you, on its own.

“Yoo-hoo~” Shokuhou Misaki says, as she steps on in, remote in hand. “You know the _strangest_ thing happened to me last night! It’s not everyday that the Railgun herself comes to my doorstep on her knees, begging for a favor.”

What? _What?_ Shokuhou Misaki? Alarm bells go off in your head. You try to teleport out of the room but you can’t. Something in your brain has already shut down, scrambling the necessary calculations. You step back, once, twice, until you’re backed against the far wall. Mikoto went to Shokuhou Misaki, this never happened in the original future timeline, if she went to _Mental Out_ , that can only mean the reason Shokuhou is here—

You glance at the window. All casual like, Shokuhou Misaki closes the door behind her, trapping you in the room with her. What’s the range on her ability? If you jump out, will she be able to stop you? She takes out a remote, clicks a button, and freezes. She stares at you. You can feel the blood draining from your face. Oh. Oh no.

“I’m here to make you forget what you learned,” she says, slowly, “but it seems there’s quite a bit more in there, clunking around your head, that even our dear Misaka-san is unaware of. Quite unbelievable stuff, hm? If I couldn’t see it all firsthand myself, I would really say that you’re, pardon the pun, _mental_.”

“Please don’t do it,” you say, you beg. “If you can read my mind, then you know what happens. I don’t want her to die. She can’t die. Don’t make me forget, Shokuhou.”

“Sorry, Shirai-san,” she says, and you would think she sounds genuinely regretful if it wasn’t for the cold look of her starry eyes. “But a lady keeps her word. And if even half of what you remember is true, well, wouldn’t it be a shame to lose another pretty face to the dark side of Academy City? You’d just be throwing your life away on top of hers. You and Misaka-san have really been lucky, you know, these sheltered lives of yours up until this point. For your own good, please don’t get mixed up in this unpleasant business~”

The ‘dark side of Academy City’? Your ‘sheltered lives’? You want to question Shokuhou, but it’s too late, she’s clicking another remote, and then before you know what’s happening, your mind is going curiously blank, and you—

You’re—

* * *

Mikoto has been missing for a couple of days now. Her disappearance nags at you, like a weed, but you try to dismiss your unease. You know she’ll come back. She’s your best friend, after all. She wouldn’t just abandon you like that.

Saten and Uiharu know the two of you had some kind of fight, but the truth is, you don’t entirely remember the details of the fight yourself. You know something happened, something important, but you can’t quite pinpoint what.

There’s a note that she left behind, that you found pinned to the top of your night desk, after you woke up on the floor of your dorm in the morning, confused and alone. In her messy scrawl, she’s written, _Sorry, Kuroko. I have to do this. When it’s finished, I promise I’ll explain everything to you._

You can only hope she’s not been up to anything illegal. In the past few days there’s been a string of attacks on a number of research facilities across the city, with no discernible link between each of them. You can feel it in the air, something strange, something _rotten_ , stirring in the city that you’ve never felt before. It makes you shiver.

You run your mind through the memories of the past month, trying to pick up when Mikoto began to act oddly, if there were any hints leading up to her disappearance, but just like with your fight, the details are all for some reason fuzzy. You can’t discern anything particularly stand-out. You do know that even though the month started with you getting shot, the rest of it, to tell the truth, has been one of the happiest times of your life.

On the night of August 22nd, they find Railgun’s body in the switchyard in School District 17. You’re with Uiharu when the news comes in over Judgement’s channels in the middle of the night. The distance separating Judgement Branch Office 177 and the switchyard in District 17 is over 5 kilometers but it takes you 0.4 seconds to traverse it over a series of ten teleportations.

The two Judgement officers who made the call shriek when you flash in front of them on scene. You brandish your armband and ask them with a calmness you don’t feel to show you the body they say they found. The place is too peaceful, you think. There are no signs of a fight, you think. No lightning scorch marks, no burning holes from arcade coins, the power in every nearby building is still on. As you make yourself consider rationally about what must have happened, the panic in your stomach starts to settle down, and you’re thinking about what a funny little story this will be to tell Mikoto later when she finally decides to come home and stop worrying you, and you’re also beginning to feel a little bit annoyed at these officers for wasting your time, don’t they know that Railgun is _Railgun,_ that what they described is a statistical impossibility. Worst case scenario, there actually is a dead body, but it’s just a case of mistaken identity because of how green they are. You can feel a headache forming in the back of your skull as you consider the number of cases you have to get back on, the mountains of paperwork you still need to fill out, but more than that what is with this horrible sense of déjà vu, why do your feet get heavier and heavier with each step you make, why is your heart _pounding_ , you step around the corner of a giant box of metal freight into an open-ish area shining cleanly and clearly under the moonlight and the distant Academy City lights and you open your mouth to scoff to speak to say _see I knew it_ and you see—

You remember everything. Your knees buckle. You put your hands into your hair you clutch your head and you scream and you scream and you _scream._

She’s dead. Again. You _failed._

You forgot, how could you have forgotten, you were going to _save her—_

_Shokuhou Misaki!_ Your rage is all-consuming, numbing, but just as quickly as it comes, it shifts to someone else. _Accelerator._ He has to still be close, right? This experiment tonight that was supposed to be for clone 10032 should have started no more than an hour ago. _Accelerator._ You teleport. You fan out from the switchyard. You push your body and brain to their limits, teleporting more than 100 times successively in the matter of seconds. You hone in on his name, that name, the horrible person who’s killed your best friend twice now. You’ll kill him.

You find him walking down a street, humming cheerfully, hands in his pockets, and you see red.

“ _Why,”_ you say, dropping in front of him, _“why did you do it, you fucking monster.”_

“...Who are you again?” he says, cocking his head. Then, he grins. “Aw, wait, you’re wearing the same uniform as that third-string. Aw. Don’t tell me. Were the two of you _friends_?”

He throws his head back, laughs. The sound of it echoes around and around in your skull. Somewhere, back at the switchyard, there’s a you that’s still screaming, and the sound of his laugh and the scream of that you begin to mix together in your head in a horrible cacophony. 

You want him to suffer before he dies. That’s your saving grace. You try to teleport a spike through his throat and the next you know there’s something buried in your own throat, piercing your trachea, and now blood starts spilling outwards from your throat. You gasp desperately for air, remembering his ability, the power to reverse vectors, and you realize that in this world, in this city, even if it spans across 11-dimensions, your teleportation is only a vector, too.

“You’re such an idiot!” he says, laughing even harder now. “Just like her! You’re such an idiot, oh geez, I’m surrounded by idiots! Ahaha, what a fucking night tonight has been! I haven’t had this much fun in _ages_!”

You try to teleport the spike out of your throat and into his again and only succeed in twisting the spike in your throat at a new angle. He raises his hand, makes a casual wave, and the next thing you know you’re flipping head over heels slamming into a nearby concrete wall. You fall to the ground. Everything hurts. The last thing you see before you black out is a bullet ricocheting off his body, the faint bzzt of electricity. Arms hooking underneath armpits, dragging you away. You see copper hair, copper eyes familiar. A dull, monotone voice. Mikoto…? Is that…?

* * *

Like with how this timeline began, you wake up in the hospital.

Your spike went through your throat with utmost precision. You can’t talk anymore because of it, you’ve rendered yourself effectively mute. You are almost impressed with the savagery of your own ability—if you were a person with any less morals, who knows what kind of damage you could do to ordinary people. You have sixteen broken bones.

You’re surprised that you’re still alive, that Accelerator didn’t kill you, but then you remember the bullet ricocheting off his body, and a girl who looked like Mikoto, dragging you away. For a second, you dare to hope. But Uiharu and Saten visit you. They tell you the news you already knew. Railgun is dead.

One of her clones, you think, in a daze. So. The whole thing with the clones and the Level Six Project. It was real, after all. One of her clones, for some reason or another, decided to save you.

Why is Accelerator doing any of this? you ask yourself. For power? Is that what he likes? Because he’s insane? Because both? Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. He’s a monster.

The all-consuming numbness of the first time around, when Mikoto died, is easier to deal with. Maybe it’s because there’s not as much shock and there was a part of you that was expecting it to happen. Maybe it’s because you’re doped up on too much medication, in too much pain, to properly think. 

You try teleporting into the past again, and you find that you can’t. Your body is still recuperating from your injuries and the most you can accomplish is fritzing yourself around the hospital. At one point you make the biggest rookie mistake of all, teleporting part of your arm into a wall, and that extends your stay indefinitely. You panic. What if this timeline was your only second chance and you blew it? What if you can’t go into the past anymore? What if Mikoto is dead for good? You consider trying to kill yourself again by throwing yourself off the top of the hospital building, to see if that’s the common denominator, before you come to the realization that of course time travel has to do with _time._

You always wondered why they classed you as a Level 5 and why the examiners weighed the speed at which you can compute your teleportations so heavily. In the grand scheme it seems like an insignificant detail, doesn’t it, when there are many Level 4 teleporters in the city who have greater maximum ranges and weights than yours. You had wondered about the internal timer in your brain, the countdown of your decreasing cooldown at the same rate as in the original timeline, and you remember the future of the original timeline when you had started to teleport so fast that it seemed like time would stop around you when you did. Now you think that your cooldown had decreased to a point where time did in fact stop. You had reached the theoretical limit where you could complete a teleportation in 0 seconds. Instantaneously.

So, what happens if you had then gotten to the next stage, you had passed the theoretical limit of 0 seconds and instantaneous teleportations? Making the assumption for a moment that a part of your calculating abilities exist outside the purview of the physicality of your brain… What if you had managed to accomplish a teleportation in _negative_ time?

The thought unsettles you as much as it reassures you. If your theory is true, then you just have to wait until you reach the date in the original timeline when your teleportation cooldown hits negative time, the day you tried to kill yourself, a month after Mikoto’s death. You don’t know why exactly it is that that negative time teleportation brought you back to the date that it did in the alleyway, but you decide not to try to think too hard about it, not to look that particular gift horse in the mouth, lest it all fall apart under scrutiny. 

It’s a difficult month of waiting in the hospital, not being able to speak to anyone, barely being able to move, in constant pain. 

Once, just once, Shokuhou Misaki visits you.

“Don’t worry, I won’t read your mind again,” she waves her hand from where she sits beside your bed. “I think I already have an idea of what’s going on in that head of yours anyways. You hate me, don’t you? You blame me for what happened?”

You glare at her.

“You have to realize it was your precious Misaka-san who asked me to do what I did,” she says. “I was only obliging her request... But what you thought did come to pass. She did die, not that I can pretend to be particularly sad about it. What I’m more curious to learn is how you managed to shrug off the power of my memory wipe. Really, how did you do it? You’re not secretly a psychic esper, are you?”

You keep glaring.

“You poor, poor thing,” she says. “It’s such a shame. I told you not to go throw your life away on top of hers. You were so beautiful. Ah, this whole tragedy could make me cry.”

She reaches for the bed and pats you on the head, ruffling your hair, all-patronizing like, before standing up. It’s the first time you seriously entertain the thought of killing her. How much you truly, deeply hate her. Accelerator seems to be plain psychotic. What’s Shokuhou’s excuse? She’s a psychopath, too?

She pauses slightly at the door when you have that thought, her hand in her purse, likely resting on a remote, and you realize she was lying about not reading your mind, because of course she was lying, and she turns around and flashes you a smile.

“I hope you have a pleasant recovery, Shirai-san,” Shokuhou says. 

When the right date comes, you clear your mind, and you teleport. When you blink, you are standing in the alleyway, and Uiharu is crying out into your ear.


	3. 3, 4

**3.**

“You keep rubbing your throat,” Saten says. “Something caught in it?”

“Ah,” you say, glancing around at the pleasant atmosphere of Joseph’s. “Something like that.”

“Be more careful next time, Shirai-san,” Uiharu sighs. “Konori-senpai wasn’t happy about what happened with that thug.”

It’s a marvel to be able to speak again. You’ll never take it for granted again. The bigger marvel is of course Mikoto, sitting beside you in the booth, perusing the menu. 

You’re tempted to say something like, _He deserved it._ The man had tried to kill you three times now, and one of those times he had almost succeeded. You hadn’t even done anything that bad, just broken a few extra bones before arresting him. There were many worse ways you could have mutilated him. Maybe you shouldn’t be having thoughts like those, but they’re the plain truth.

As the four of you wrap up for the day, you say to Mikoto, “Want to head to the arcade?”

“Right now?” she says, surprised. “There’s curfew.”

“I can teleport us back before the Dorm Supervisor notices,” you offer. 

“Then sure, why not,” Mikoto says. Her mouth twitches. “Since you’re the one inviting.”

You’re normally the uptight, rule-following one while she’s more laidback and relaxed about these things. You don’t particularly enjoy the arcade but you know Mikoto never passes on an opportunity when she has the freetime. For you, it’s been a month since you’ve seen her alive. You want to maximize your time with her as much as possible.

“The whole point of coming here is to have fun,” she comments. She shoots a zombie. Blood splatters across the screen and shivers immediately go down your spine.

“I’m having fun,” you try to say. You really are trying to enjoy your time with her, but you can’t concentrate one bit.

“Yeah, right,” Mikoto casts you a look. Even though the game is still ongoing, she shelves the fake plastic gun, and turns to look at you with an unusually serious expression. “What’s going on?”

“I…” you say. You swallow. “Can I hug you?”

“Huh?” she says, and immediately looks around to see if anyone is watching the two of you. She rubs the back of her neck. “Er, sure. Why not?”

You hug her. The temptation to start sobbing like you did in the last timeline is extraordinarily strong. But you manage to rein yourself in so that the most that happens is that your breath hitches, and your eyes burn, and you pull yourself away when you feel Mikoto start to fidget uncomfortably.

“I need to talk to you,” you say. “About something important. I know it’s going to sound unbelievable, but I can assure you that what I’m going to say is only the truth.”

You teleport the two of you back to the dorms, seconds before curfew. The Dorm Supervisor sneers at the two of you, displeased, but you can’t bring yourself to care. A time when you were ever seriously afraid of the Dorm Supervisor already feels distant.

In the privacy of your shared room, you open your mouth, and it all comes pouring out. About the original timeline and how she died, about the second timeline and how she died, how you have traveled back in time in order to save her. You hesitate on the topic of the Level Six Shift Project and Accelerator and the clones, but you push right on through that as well. Somehow, in both of the previous timelines, Mikoto found out about them on her own, and so you think there’s no use in hiding it, if she’s going to figure it out sooner or later. She would have asked you how it is that she died anyway.

There’s silence for a long, long time after you finish speaking. Mikoto says, weakly, “You’re joking, right?”

“I wish I was,” you say.

“I want to believe you but this is all just...” then she shakes her head. “You haven’t been listening to Saten-san and her urban legends too much, have you? She hasn’t been rubbing off on you?”

“No, she hasn’t. As much as I hate it, like I said, it’s the truth.”

“20,000 clones of _me,_ ” she says. “And… Accelerator? The number one ranked Level 5?”

“Yes.”

“Why would he even kill me?”

“You were trying to stop the experiments,” you say quietly. “I don’t know all the specifics, but he… he about as much admitted it to me, when I confronted him, he was the one who… He...”

A second moment of silence. The air between the two of you is uncomfortable in a way it never was before. Mikoto looks at you like you are a stranger to her. You try to remain steady, looking back at her.

The next day, after your classes, the two of you go looking for her clones in the city.

She still doesn’t fully believe your story, and if you can confirm this fact for her, then it’ll be an important step. You realize that you haven’t actually met one of her clones before either. You have no idea what they’re like, except for that one of them did save you in the last timeline. 

Considering the date… Your memory of the papers is good. The next clone to be killed is 9782. In this section of District 3.

You find the clone in the mall, goggles on its forehead, examining a gacha machine.

Oh.

It’s… It… It actually looks just like…

It’s not Mikoto, you remind yourself. It’s not really a person. You’re not trying to lie to yourself, to make a horrible situation feel just the slightly less horrible. If Accelerator isn’t actually killing people, see, then, one possible way to prevent Mikoto’s death is to just convince her to keep out of his way. 

The two of you approach the clone.

It has this robotic, monotone way of speaking, referring to itself in the third person, and that relieves you. It speaks evasively, and when confronted with the accusation that it’s a clone, it asks for an authentication code. There’s a dullness in its eyes.

“Do you want that?” Mikoto says, suddenly, pointing inside the gacha machine at a capsule with a Gekota pin. “Looks cute, doesn’t it?”

“Misaka is astonished to see that her Onee-sama has such childish tastes,” the clone intones in a deadpan, and Mikoto turns bright red, and you snicker before you can help yourself.

Then you sober up. No. No, you absolutely cannot get attached to her— _it,_ to _it,_ you cannot get attached to the clone. You are getting a heavy sinking feeling in your gut. _Kuroko. I never knew you could be this selfish._ Why is it that Mikoto was unable to leave the experiments alone in the previous two timelines? That was what she was doing the nights she disappeared, certainly, getting involved? You are beginning to get the feeling that you have already made a giant, horrible mistake. Maybe you shouldn’t have told Mikoto about the Level Six Shift Project.

Mikoto uses her powers to retrieve the Gekota pin and offers it to the clone, perhaps as a token of goodwill, fixing it to the clone’s skirt. You receive a call. It’s Konori-senpai. You’re going to tell her that yes, you’re sorry for skipping out on Judgement work today, but it’s been so long since you’ve taken a day off, you hope she understands, so—

So, Uiharu is dead. She was in the Seventh Mist Mall when there was a bombing. Gravitons. You don’t even remember the guy’s name, just that he had some dumb stupid grudge against Judgement members. You were so caught up in all of this, that it completely slipped your mind, the Level Upper, Kiyama Harumi—

Mikoto sees the way you’ve rapidly paled. She asks you what’s wrong.

There’s a closed casket funeral. You can’t—Uiharu—You—Why is it that—In the original timeline, Mikoto had been with Uiharu when the bomb went off, and had managed to save her. In the second timeline, Uiharu had been visiting you in the hospital. But here, but _here—_

“Didn’t you know this would happen?” Mikoto asks you, quietly.

“I forgot,” you say, numbly, unable to lie through the veil of your grief and shame.

Mikoto looks at you like you are a stranger to her. 

Once again you can’t convince her to give up on the idea of stopping the experiments. The clones are people, your best friend tells you, and not only are they real people, they’re her _sisters._ While you were at the Seventh Mist Mall, identifying Uiharu’s remains for Anti-Skill, she had spent the remaining afternoon with 9782 and witnessed Accelerator killing 9782. You have definitely made a horrible mistake, you think. You shouldn’t have told her. Next time, you’ll—

Next time? Next time? Why are you thinking about it as if Mikoto is already dead?

In a distant voice, Mikoto asks you what’s your grand _plan_. How are you going to save the clones’ lives? The clones’ lives? you repeat. Uiharu is dead. You just wanted to save Mikoto. You don’t have a grand plan. Accelerator is Accelerator. You felt his power, the way he swatted you into that wall, turned your own power against you. You just wanted to make sure Mikoto stayed far away from him. Come on, you already told her she died twice, she can’t really be—

The two of you break into the research facilities. With your help, she is able to destroy them twice as fast as she was able to do it alone. The two of you break into the Tree Diagram facility, and Mikoto asks Tree Diagram how Railgun can defeat Accelerator, and gets the answer that she can’t. What about Railgun and you working together? The two of you can’t. Can anyone defeat Accelerator? No.

The two of you hijack a weapon’s facility and destroy the Orihime 1 satellite.

“Ah,” Mikoto says, afterwards, sifting through the papers. She smiles a paper-thin smile. “I think I understand now why I have to die.”

“Mikoto—”

“Accelerator’s supposed to be able to defeat me in precisely 185 moves,” she says. “And killing me 128 times is one way that would allow him to achieve Level 6. But what if, say, Accelerator’s able to defeat me in just one move? What if we show the scientists that the Tree Diagram’s calculations about Railgun’s strength were wrong? Wouldn’t that invalidate the Level Six Shift experiments, and since now we’ve ensured that Tree Diagram is gone, wouldn’t they be unable to recalibrate the experiment?”

“That’s an insane plan,” you say, desperately.

“Obviously, the two me’s from before didn’t think so,” Mikoto says. “And you clearly don’t have a better idea, do you, Kuroko.”

“I’m not going to let yourself go kill yourself again—”

“Damn it!” she roars, slamming her fists into the table. Her power goes wild, the lights overhead flicker. “It’s not about what you want! You’re really telling me to just let them all _die_? How can my one life be worth all of theirs? In the first place, it’s all my fault! I was so stupid!”

She’s crying. You’ve never seen her break down like this before. When her power calms down, she says, dully, “I’m sorry.”

When you come to the next morning, alone, and Shokuhou Misaki comes knocking, you’re prepared. You do what you’ve always wanted to do, your fist snapping across her nose in such a wet, satisfying crunch. The blonde tumbles onto the ground and looks up at you with a wide-eyed expression. You stomp onto her purse, relishing in the sound of her remotes breaking, and you spit at her.

“Go fuck yourself, Shokuhou,” you say.

It’s the morning of August 1st, a beautiful, summer morning.

All over the newspapers and every channel, the only thing anybody’s talking about, is _Railgun’s death—_

While you were unconscious, Mikoto went ahead and got herself killed.

For all your efforts, this timeline, you got Mikoto killed an entire twenty-one days before she was supposed to—

Uiharu is dead, too. Sweet Uiharu who never hurt so much as lifted a finger to hurt anyone. Because of your failures.

You have an entire fifty-one days left to wait out this horrible timeline before you can send yourself back in time.

Ah. It’s too much, it’s too much, it’s too much, it’s too much, it’s too much—

“I was going to make a pun, but it seems a different me has already done it,” someone says, settling besides where you’re curled up on a bench in a hidden corner of Tokiwadai’s campus. You have no idea how she was able to find you, Shokuhou Misaki’s holding a handkerchief up to her nose, dabbing at the sporadic bleeding. “Wow, who knew you had such a strong right hook, Shirai-san! All that Judgement training really’s done something for building up your muscles, huh?”

“Go away,” you say. Her other hand is in her purse, you know, on a remote that somehow escaped being destroyed. “Don’t read my mind.” 

“You really need to move on, Shirai-san,” Shokuhou advises. “I’m serious. Third time’s the charm just blew up spectacularly in your face, didn’t it? And you already feel like you can’t handle it, don’t you?”

“Why are you _here?_ ” you demand, shooting to your feet. “Why do you keep bothering me? Isn’t it enough? Stop gloating, I know you’re happy that she’s dead, that I’m suffering! If you don’t leave me alone, I swear to god, I’ll kill you!”

Shokuhou stands up as well and smiling with her flat starry eyes, she says, “I don’t know where you got the idea that I hate you and enjoy seeing you suffer, Shirai-san, though certainly, you do hate me, do you? Yes. You do. I just don’t understand why. Am I that abhorrent to you?”

Your fist trembles. You want to punch her again. 

“And I admittedly can’t really pretend,” Shokuhou says, still smiling, “that I’m not happy Misaka-san has left this world—”

You teleport yourself away before you can do something truly reckless. You need to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. You need to be alone.

A vending machine in a park. The person who settles themselves behind you on the bench now is one of Mikoto’s clones.

She says that you seem to be in significant emotional distress and ask if you’re okay, if there’s anything she can do to alleviate your discomfort. What is she _doing_? Doesn’t she know you were the one who advocated for abandoning her to die? Despite your best efforts, when did you start thinking about the clones as _she_ s instead of _it_ s?

“I want to blame you,” you say, “I want to blame you, but you didn’t… You didn’t ask to be born… You didn’t ask for this to happen to you. I keep trying to tell myself you’re not human, that you’re not people, that it would be easier to just let Accelerator… But—!”

Your hands clench into fists. But—you’re a Judgement officer. You became a Judgement officer to save and help people. And you can’t really live with yourself knowing that you stood by and did nothing. You will never be able to look Mikoto in the eye again if you did. She will never be able to love a person as cowardly as you. What she did, what she’s sacrificed three times now, she truly is the bravest person you know.

You spend the next 51 days with the clones. You get to know many of them, their little quirks, habits, what they enjoy, and somewhere in your mind the shift solidly comes from ‘clone’ to ‘sister’. You learn about the Misaka network, how they’re all connected together by that great invisible web. There is no question about it. They are all human. You grow to care deeply about them. They are good to you. Their company across the span of those 51 days makes you feel less alone. Grounds you.

“Be honest with me,” you say. “Have the experiments—have they really stopped?”

Misaka 9850 says, calmly, “They were halted while the researchers recomputed the variables and parameters of the project by hand. It has become consensus that Onee-sama deliberately allowed herself to be killed by Accelerator in an attempt to interfere with the experiments. They plan to resume the experiments shortly. The Level Six Shift Project will go on.”

Somewhere deep down, you expected as much. All the air goes out of your lungs.

“Misaka is grateful for these past two months,” she says. “We have learned and experienced many new things. We are happy. Thank you for having been our friend.”

“Shut up,” you mutter, gripping your forehead. “You’re not going to die. None of you are going to die.” Not them, not Uiharu, not Mikoto. You’re going to fix all of this.

Here is your resolve. You’ll save them, no matter how many times it’ll take, no matter what it’ll cost you, even if you might not be human by the end of it.

**4.**

Like with the second timeline, you’re going to be doing the fourth timeline alone. You can’t tell Mikoto about any of it, as much as you want to. No more crying, no more wanting her to hold you. You can _earn_ that right when this is all over.

First thing’s first, the Level Upper and Kiyama Harumi, take care of that. Uiharu’s saved, done. Next thing, sabotaging the facilities and Tree Diagram. Although so far it’s always been the case that the scientists have back-up copies of the project and they’ll simply float the details to other facilities through the city in order to continue it, according to what you learned in the last timeline from the sisters, the experiments had still been delayed by your actions of destroying the facilities, if only the slightest bit. That makes it worth it.

Mikoto starts to worry after your absences. You only return to the dorm in order to sleep. You skip classes. Every single minute you waste, you know, is another sister that dies. You make contact with one of the sisters and informs her to stay away from Mikoto no matter what, and when pressed, you reluctantly share the circumstances of why it’s so important.

They agree. Not because they think you’ll succeed in saving them, but because they’re resigned to their deaths, and they don’t want to see Mikoto dragged down with them, too.

Without Electromaster powers, it’s not as easy for you to destroy the facilities. Getting in is a cinch, but you have to resort to using stolen explosives filched from Anti-Skill’s lockers. One time, you’re infiltrating a particular research lab only for something to blow up underfoot. It would have taken a leg off if you weren’t able to teleport quickly away.

Did you drop one of your bombs? No way you’re that careless. It turns out there’s this odd blonde girl who was lying in wait for you, the whole facility is tripped with motion sensors so no matter where you teleport, you barely have the time to react before another bomb is blowing up in your face. Then there’s this other girl with this strange ability to track your AIM field—

Who are these _people_ —

Mercenaries? Did Mikoto have to ever deal—

Meltdowner’s electron beam clips you in the shoulder before you can react and vaporizes a giant chunk of it. The pain almost makes you black out. You thought getting spiked through the throat and breaking sixteen bones via Accelerator was bad, but it’s nothing compared to this, it’s all you can do to concentrate long enough to teleport yourself to an escape.

The last thing you need to do is go to a hospital again, to waste even more valuable time, but you have no choice, not unless you want to bleed out and die. When Mikoto finds out that you’ve been injured, she’s _pissed._ She wants to know who’s done this to you. She wants to take revenge. Of course you’re not going to tell her, you refuse to give up a single breadcrumb no matter how she cajoles and threatens and pleads, and the sisters steadfastly avoid her per your instructions. 

But when you finally get discharged from the hospital, it’s to a confrontation. And not only does Mikoto know it was Meltdowner who hurt you, she knows about the Level Six Shift Project, too. You feel totally numb. How? _How?_ Where did you possibly go wrong this time?

“Shokuhou visited you when you were unconscious,” she informs you, through gritted teeth, and now you’re the one who’s pissed, _Shokuhou Misaki, her again, why,_ “she told me what she saw in your mind, about Meltdowner, and when I went to confront Meltdowner, _she_ told me about—about— _Kuroko._ How could you keep this from me? What gave you the right?”

“I—I didn’t think it was that important,” you say. You say, “And it’s okay. That last facility that I sabotaged was the last one that needed to be destroyed. There’s no more, they’re going to shut down the experiments now.” You say, “You don’t have to worry about anything anymore, Mikoto. I just didn’t want to worry you in the first place. I’m sorry for being such an awful best friend. Let’s spend more time together starting now.” And lastly, you say, “Shokuhou obviously just wanted to mess with your head. You know how she is. She’s a horrible person.”

You’re a horrible, horrible liar. But somehow Mikoto believes you. And she hugs you, and tells you never to do something like this again, and you want to cry.

When you’re as healed as you can be, there’s no more delaying the inevitable. It’s time for you to fight Accelerator. You’ve done as much research as you can about his ability, you’ve made the plans that you can. You stalk Accelerator across Academy City using your teleportations. Between killing sisters, it turns out he has a pretty set route—house, convenience store, loitering, visiting research labs—that you can use to your advantage.

The bombs fail.

The poison fails. It gets into his body but doesn’t seem to affect him at all. You try different kinds, neurotoxins, nerve agents, venoms. Nothing works.

Heavy-duty sniping rounds fail.

You drop a building on him. He emerges unscathed.

At this point, he obviously knows someone is trying to murder him, but he doesn’t care at all. He doesn’t change his routine at all. He’s taunting you, you know, each time you fail and each time he kills a new sister. Once, he looks up, and across the street from you he makes eye contact with you and he laughs, and you know he knows you know he _knows._

You lure him into an abandoned building and use thermobarics, trying to deprive him of oxygen, but it turns out he can _fly_ and move himself at astonishing speeds when he wants to, and he almost catches you, that time, you could feel his breath ghosting on your skin, his words, _oh what do we have here, a little fly on the wall?_

Mikoto confronts you again, for a second time, about your continued absences from Tokiwadai and the dorm at night. You make excuses, you try to placate her, she’s not pleased. She’s not pleased at all. She’s growing more and more suspicious. You can feel it, something’s going to give.

You try to drown Accelerator. It’s one of your most convoluted plans yet and takes days to set up. A giant watertower, bursting, washing over him just as he’s passing it. It fails.

You try to make him garrote himself with tripwires and almost kill a number of pedestrians as collateral. 

You try to teleport your spikes into him again and injure yourself again, though not as severely as last time, and you favor your left arm for the days after.

You try to teleport him into the ground, you get up and close, you touch him, you’re so fast with your teleportations after all there’s no way he can properly process it right, but all that happens is you inadvertently teleport yourself into the ground. You manage to break yourself free with another teleportation, and a sister finds you, pacing a street at night, hysterical, trying desperately to breathe in and out in and out in and out.

You try to snipe him in his sleep but his vector reversal barrier, whatever it is, remains active even when he sleeps.

You steal Capacity Downs from the black market. They don’t have an effect on him at all. But their horrible screeching sound gives you an idea. You try to kill him via sleep deprivation. You set up alarm clocks all around his house to nonstop ring, everywhere he goes you set up alarm clocks, you even infiltrate the research labs he goes to setting up these alarm clocks. You can tell this seriously annoys him, because although it turns out he can mute sound when he wants to, not being able to hear anything except excessive screeching gets kind of old fast, and you make sure to use all different kinds of alarm clocks so the frequencies and whatnot are always changing. But the side effect of this is that you exhaust yourself with your constant efforts, and eventually it’s inevitable he catches you in the act, and this time he doesn’t just break sixteen bones in your body, he breaks every single bone in your body, he cracks your spine alone in thirty-two places, he does irreparable damage. But he tosses you aside and lets you live, because you _amuse_ him, because he knows you would only be able to live the way you are in continuous, constant, unremitting pain, because he wants you to know how insignificant you are to him, like less than a bug, he wants you to know that he can’t even be bothered to step on you and clean you off his shoe.

The hospital, again. You make Mikoto cry, and Uiharu as well, and Saten. Your body is in really really poor condition. It can’t ever be fixed. A lifetime of paralysis from the chin down. A few sisters visit you in secret and tell you the next time you go back in time, just stop. You can’t respond to any of them because your lungs have collapsed. The days blur together in pain, your desperate attempts to cling to life, you count them down until the day you can travel back in time, the number the only thing giving you any sense of focus and purpose. Then you debate with yourself, agonizingly, that maybe this is the best outcome you can hope for? At least Mikoto is still alive. But the experiments, the experiments, you know they keep going on and on—

Shokuhou Misaki visits you and reads your mind and is silent for a long, long time, until the ticking of the clock on the wall begins to drive you mad. Why is it _always_ her. Then, she asks you if you’ve learned your lesson.

_Fuck you,_ you channel your eyes into as much a glare as possible. _Go fucking die. Why did you tell her about Meltdowner? Why are you trying to ruin me?_

“Misaka-san,” Shokuhou begins, pauses. “Misaka-san died last night. She poured all her effort into finding out who did this to you. It wasn’t some kind of righteous suicide this time. She genuinely tried to fight Accelerator for your sake. It’s interesting, how she was killed. Surely you know that Accelerator can reflect even railguns?”

The image of Mikoto, cold and bleeding, pierced by light. If you could scream, you would scream, but all you manage is a broken, wheezing noise of sorrow and agony and hate. 

“Shirai-san,” Shokuhou says, looking at you with her flat, starry eyes. Last time, she ruffled your hair. This time, she reaches over to smooth the sweat-drenched locks of hair from your forehead. “Why can’t you see? I’m not trying to ruin you. I’m just trying to help. You can’t save her. Give up.”

_I hope you die,_ you tell her, with your mind.

She sighs, and reaches for her remote, and she wipes your memories.

* * *

The next day, you wake up, and you remember. Shokuhou Misaki visits again and is only marginally surprised. 

“I’ve been mulling over the problem of how you remember, and I think it has to do with that decreasing ‘teleportation cooldown’ of yours,” Shokuhou says. “Your brain, for whatever reason, is in a constant state of flux. All the changes I try to make to it don’t stick for long. They just sort of inevitably melt away.”

“It’s quite bothersome,” Shokuhou says. “I’m not used to not being able to do what I want to people, you know? Yes, yes, you hate me, no need to look at me like that. Misaka-san was the only person I ever met who was completely, one hundred percent opaque to me. I can break through many Electromasters’ defense given enough time, but her power was quite strong.”

“I wonder what would happen if I decided to try to manipulate Accelerator,” she muses, and there’s a brief moment of silence before you watch her break out into an honest to god giggle. It’s disturbing. “He’d be able to reflect my power, no doubt. Would I accidentally give myself brain damage? That would be quite ironic. I’m sure you and Misaka-san would find it amusing. Wouldn’t you?”

Shokuhou Misaki visits you again the next day. And the next day. And the next. She talks to you about the stupidest, most inane things in her life, she tells the doctors and nurses the two of you are childhood friends and charms the pants off of them, she reads books to you like you’re a child, she asks the nurses if she can remove the clock from the wall, obviously being annoyed by the incessant ticking as well, and all you want is for her to _leave you alone._ But she never stops coming. Even Saten, the only one of your friends left, doesn’t come every day, like she does. It must be because you _interest_ her, for whatever reason, you’re Shokuhou’s newest little _plaything._ There’s no other explanation. Your hate of her doesn’t diminish one bit and it becomes the other thing that you concentrate on in order to hang on. She remains unruffled.

Before you know it, the days are up. Shokuhou Misaki is with you when you prepare to make the teleportation.

“Shirai-san, darling,” she says, and you must be imagining it, the slightest flicker of emotion across her face, “try not to put yourself in the hospital too much again, okay?”

And then you are standing in the alleyway.


	4. 5, 6, 13, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43

**5.**

The first thing you do in the fifth timeline is kill Shokuhou Misaki. She lives in the dorms in the interior of Tokiwadai. In the middle of the night, you sneak into her room and teleport to her bedside. You stare down at her peaceful, sleeping face, and teleport three spikes straight through her brain. 

Death is instantaneous. You have an axe with you. The plan was for you to smash apart her forehead after you killed her, to pick out the spikes from her gray matter, so as to disguise what you’ve done. But for some reason, staring down at her still peaceful looking form, you can’t bring yourself to do something so callous, so brutal. You remember the close casket funeral of the original timeline and the look on the face of Mikoto’s mother. You remember standing at the podium, choking up on your emotions, unable to get out anything but a single, worthless _Sorry,_ and a lump comes up in your throat.

A part of you can’t believe you actually killed her. Another part of you says it was necessary. Once the common denominator of her has been removed, surely, the timelines won’t get messed up anymore. A strange, inexplicable emotion comes over you. You did hate her. But even if the two of you are enemies, through her power, she was the only one who could ever really come close to understanding what you are going through. 

You track down Shizuri Mugino and kill her and the rest of ITEM, too, the exact same way you killed Shokuhou Misaki, before Anti-Skill figures out it’s you. The modus operandi of a teleporter, and someone who uses the spikes the way you do, is, after all, rather distinctive. It’s difficult to catch a teleporter, but when your whole face is plastered across the city on every billboard and every screen, when you’re the single talk of the town, there’s nowhere really for you to hide. They bring in another teleporter, a girl called Musujime Awaki, and although you manage to beat her black and blue, she distracts you long enough for you to be captured.

They lock you up. You know the only reason they let you live is because the scientists and researchers who operate in the behind the scenes are fascinated by you. They’re curious. The Level 5 Killer, they’re calling you, they want to know how and why you did it. They want to pull you apart, see your insides. Those damned scientists, you think the entire time, those stupid, goddamn scientists, it’s all so fucked up and rotten, this whole city, it’s because of _them._ Were you bitter about being ranked so low? Did you resent those other Level 5s? What makes you tick, Shirai Kuroko? They inundate you with questions like these.

You refuse to crack under the pressure of their interrogations. They bring in other telepaths and mental espers but they can’t break through your mind. It’s the nature of your brain, you think of Shokuhou’s words from the previous timeline, in a constant state of change because of your evolving ability, but unlike her, they can’t even so much as manage to read your mind and see your memories, which Shokuhou Misaki could always, always do, no matter what resistance you built to her memory wipe. There’s a reason she’s a Level 5 and ranked above you. There’s a reason you killed her first in this timeline.

They bring in Uiharu and Saten. They can’t stand to look at you. You still don’t crack, you can stand to look at them, their uncomprehending faces, and you want to tell them, if only they could see it all from your point of view, they’d understand. 

They bring in Mikoto. There’s a part of her, it’s obvious, that still can’t believe you’ve actually done something like this. She’s in denial. “Kuroko,” she says. You’ve never heard her sound like this, this strangled version of your best friend. “ _Why?”_

They’re afraid you’re going to try and kill Mikoto, too, as another Level 5, but they shouldn’t be afraid. They keep bringing her around to see you, noticing the effect she has on you, until you make yourself say such horrible and awful things that you drive her away for good. You’ve resigned yourself. This timeline, you know, from the second you killed Shokuhou Misaki and did not disguise that it was you, was already ruined. You won’t be so sentimental next time.

You’re forced to lounge around in the prison cell. When they’re not running all kinds of tests and experiments, they have you on ability suppressors, constantly injected with a cocktail of drugs, and there’s the ever present loud background sounds of Capacity Downs working overtime, but you can feel it, nonetheless, your ability becoming more powerful with each passing day. On the night of August 22nd, you’re finally able to break out of your cell and you go to the switchyard in District 17. There, like always, you find her dead body and you cradle it in your arms. It’s been five times now. You have no more tears. You feel empty inside. 

“Mikoto,” you say her name like a prayer, the last thread of your sanity. “I’ll save you. I’ll save you. I promise.”

The sisters gather, a silent, watching crowd.

“I’ll save you all, too,” you say. “Just wait.”

You spend the rest of the timeline on the run. They scapegoat you as Railgun’s killer, as with Mental Out and Meltdowner, and your reputation grows into that of a fearsome legend. They send people like Sogiita Gunha after you, even Dark Matter tries to hunt you down, but with your teleportation speed getting infinitesimally close to instantaneous, you don’t have to engage them in a battle when you can just disappear from them with ease. Musujime Awaki challenges you to another fight, except on her own, and isolated, it’s frighteningly easy for you to shatter her mental state. You almost feel bad, seeing the shivering, sniveling thing Awaki’s reduced to, but then again, she got in your way.

Once more, you jump back in time.

**6.**

You kill Shokuhou Misaki. You kill Shizuri Mugino and ITEM. You get away with their deaths, this time, and no one suspects you. You discover that it has become exponentially easier to square yourself with the idea of being a murderer. You just shove all the dark thoughts into the corner where your dreams exist, so they can’t torment you when you’re awake. You wash and scrub your hands until they’re red and raw.

You don’t bother with destroying any of the facilities this time except for Tree Diagram and Orihime-1. You make contact with a sister. You declare your intentions to save them. You set up safehouses all over the city and you figure out the facilities where they’re keeping the remainder of the sisters in stasis, and one by one, working painstakingly hard, you help break all ten thousand of them out and usher them to your safehouses. You’re forced to teleport a good deal of them.

Such abuse of your ability floors you for a couple of days afterwards, leaving you in so much agony you can’t move, but on your terms, it’s a success. It’s relatively early in the timeline, Mikoto hasn’t made contact with any of the sisters, and without any clones, the experiments can’t continue. Accelerator can’t kill anyone. All you have to do is somehow get them all out of the city, somewhere far, far away, and they should be safe.

Easier said than done. How do you evacuate 10,000 people without anyone noticing? You do the math. Assume you have to teleport each sister an average of 500 kilometers away, and assume you work nonstop at a constant rate of 0.05 seconds per teleportation, and assume you still have your limitations of 500 meters per teleport and 500 kg per teleport. Assume you can take 10 sisters with you at one time.

That’s 1,000 teleports per ten sisters, or a total of 1,000,000 teleports you have to achieve. Assuming the effort doesn’t kill you, it would still take 50,000 seconds or 34.7 days of nonstop teleportation. Accounting for the fact that they’re round trips, and you have to teleport yourself back to the safehouses each time, then it more than doubles the amount of time it would take.

They raid the safehouses while you’re trying to figure out the best way to hijack a couple dozen planes. You break the sisters out, again, only to find, somehow, that there’s even more of them than you remember from before.

“It costs 180,000 yen to produce one of us,” Misaka 10012 informs you.

Oh.

“Even if you manage to save us,” she says, “they would just make more of us. And those sisters would still die.”

Oh.

“We won’t live for long,” she says. “We’re not built to last. A couple of years, at most. Thank you for trying.”

“This isn’t the end,” you insist. “I’ll keep trying, no matter what. There is a way. There has to be one. I’ll keep saving you one by one then if I have to.”

Your _resolve—_

Then Accelerator finds the safehouses. In one night, he dyes the city streets crimson.

And when Mikoto finds out, like always, Mikoto dies.

**13.**

This timeline, you destroy all the facilities again. And then you destroy more of them. And more of them. And more of them. You destroy as many facilities you can, you’re aiming for destroying a city’s worth of facilities, because fuck Academy City that’s what, you’re going to _end_ every bit of scientific progress in Academy City yourself if that’s what you have to do, because doing that is still easier than you trying to kill Accelerator. You’ve just spent six timelines trying to kill him, trying and failing miserably each time.

Going through the motions of destroying the facilities is oddly cathartic. You realize that in many cases there were people in those labs you blew up. You realize you’ve accidentally killed a lot of people. Then the thought occurs to you, why are you targeting the labs, the infrastructure, when you could just target the faculty in the first place? No more scientists, no more experiments! Easy!

You give it a good run, this timeline. You think the idea was not a bad one. But in the end there are just too many people and labs and logistically, you couldn’t keep up. Just like with the idea of teleporting all the sisters away, it falls apart in the details. For two months, though, you had terrorized the city pretty effectively.

At the end of the timeline, you realize you forgot about Uiharu again, and that you didn’t speak to Mikoto nor the sisters even once.

You wonder, When did you become so cold?

You wonder, Are you the monster?

Again and again, it goes.

**16.**

This timeline, you’re especially careless. You don’t know how, but you tip the scientists off to your identity. By this point in time, Shokuhou, Shizuri, and ITEM are dead, of course, so instead they send SCHOOL after you.

You discover that Kakine Teitoku, Dark Matter, seems just as unkillable as Accelerator. This gives you an idea. He’s surprisingly easy to provoke, the number 2 ranked Level 5 in the city, and with your ability, you manage to lead him straight on a collision course with Accelerator.

You watch the battle with bated breath. For the first time, you witness someone actually causing physical damage to Accelerator. But you shouldn’t have gotten your hopes up. Accelerator destroys Dark Matter with ease, except not before the resulting battle obliterates an entire district of the city, too. Thousands of people die as casualties. Why do you have to remind yourself again. Accelerator is unbeatable. But still, you have to keep trying.

Back in time you go.

**19.**

You spend this entire timeline locked up in your room, sleeping as much as you can. It’s like that original, distant timeline which feels like a long ago memory belonging to another person, when you grieved for Mikoto for the first time. Did any of that ever really happen to you? When Mikoto dies, you almost don’t notice, because it feels like she’s been dead for a long time.

**20.**

Mikoto dies.

**21.**

She dies.

**22.**

Why is it that no matter what you do, she keeps…?

**23.**

This timeline, Saten dies. It’s the first time it’s ever happened and due to a bunch of no name thugs no less, and her death is so shocking to you, so fucking ridiculous, that you’re unable to stop yourself from laughing. You get slapped a lot, people think you’ve lost it, and ah, well, you’re beginning to think they’re not wrong, that your sanity disappeared sometime long ago, somewhere you can’t find anymore. You know what they say about Level 5s losing their marbles.

“Sorry,” you choke out, between the laughs, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

**27.**

You kidnap and drug Mikoto. You keep her locked up in a nice, safe cell in an abandoned part of the city. The plan this time is to… Well, you don’t really know what the plan is anymore. But here, like this, there’s no way she can get herself killed.

The sisters, of all people, find out where you’re keeping her. They distract you and break her out when you’re not paying attention. The betrayal _hurts._ You can’t believe it.

“It’s all for you!” you scream. “I’m doing this for—“

It’s the first time that Mikoto has ever fired a railgun at you. The blast is powerful and whips your hair back. The coin misses your face by centimeters.

You know her precision. It was a deliberate miss. She’s too _kind,_ you think, if she had just aimed a few centimeters to the left, haha, then you would have a giant hole in your head, you would be gone, you would—

“Who are you,” Mikoto whispers. “Who are you, and what have you done with my best friend?”

Who… Who are you?

Why, you’re… you’re...

**28.**

Another timeline spent doing nothing.

You’re beginning to wish you could sleep forever, even if it is to be plagued by nothing but nightmares.

Mikoto dies.

**29.**

Mikoto dies.

**30.**

She dies.

**31.**

She dies and dies and dies they all die they keep dying you can’t do this anymore you can’t you can’t you can’t but but you have to—

**32.**

—why doesn’t it ever stop—

**33.**

Kongou Mitsuko and her pals kick the dust this time, too, honestly, who even gives a fucking shit about—

**34.**

Mikoto dies.

**35.**

Mikoto dies.

**36.**

Saten again, and Uiharu.

And then Mikoto—

**37.**

**38.**

**39.**

**40.**

**41.**

**42.**

**43.**

“Shirai-san?”

On the lip of the building, you stare down, at the far away ground. The date is July 20th.

You stare and stare. How tempting it looks. If you just jump, and if you don’t teleport, then it’ll all be over, you can finally rest.

But Mikoto—

Is she dead yet? No, it’s July 20th. Not yet. But you can already see it playing out in your mind, just like with the sisters. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over again she dies and never stops dying she dies. Every blink you see her blood every breath you breathe tastes of death every dream you have is nothing but nightmares. 

How many times will you have to keep doing this.

Just one step. It’s so tempting. 

You begin to fall. You do fall.

Someone grabs your arm. You’re hanging off the edge of the building.

Who…?

Shokuhou Misaki.

Her expression shows the obvious strain of trying to keep you up. She’s not an athletic person. Somehow, the blonde does manage to pull you up and drags you away from the ledge with a surprising amount of force. She shoves you against the wall.

“What are you doing?” she hisses. You’ve never witnessed her like this before, at a loss of herself. She says, “What will Misaka-san think? Your friends? _Shirai-san_!”

“Ah,” you say, cracking your lips apart slightly. “So, I forgot to kill you, this time.”

She stares at you. She lets go of you and takes out a remote. You let her do whatever she wants, you’re still limp against the wall, what does it matter, you can just teleport back in time again, reset everything, you’ll remember to kill her next time. Or maybe you won’t have to. When you reappear in the alleyway, when Uiharu’s voice crackles in your ear, maybe what you should do is teleport yourself, right up to the muzzle of that thug’s gun, make sure the bullet pierces straight through your heart.

Shokuhou clicks the button. She staggers back and for a few minutes she says nothing, just holding her head in her hands, her breathing rapid and uneven.

“You’re…” Shokuhou eventually says.

“I know,” you say. You smile. “I want to give up."

“Shirai-san.” She has this particular way of saying your name that no one else does.

“I keep failing over and over and over again. She keeps dying. I don’t know what to do. Shokuhou. Tell me. What am I supposed to do? Tell me, please, before I… I… Shokuhou, please, tell me, what am I supposed to do? Tell me. Before I lose it.”

She takes out a different remote. She clicks another button. And all of a sudden it’s like a fog has been lifted over your head, your mind clears up, sharpens, and you think, oh my god, what am I _doing._ You’re spilling your guts out to one of your greatest enemies.

You think, what have I _done._

You’ve killed so many and many people. You’ve become a monster just as bad as Accelerator. You’ve hurt the people you love the most, the most important person to you in the world. How many times have you driven her away now and said horrible things to her, all in the justification of saving her. You remember, that timeline where you _kidnapped_ her, you remember more plans, some too horrifying to recount, all failed—

You thought you had no more tears. You thought you could feel nothing anymore. But all of a sudden, now, you can’t stop crying. You’re falling apart. The tears come and you weep and weep. You double over, you try to throw up, nothing comes out.

This is awful.

“I never hated you,” Shokuhou Misaki says, quietly, and the words make you jolt, “let’s just make that crystal clear, okay? Never for one second, Shirai-san, have I wanted to see you suffer. I’ve always, from the bottom of my heart, wanted to help you.”

“You’re lying,” you say.

“I admit, I’m not the most straightforward person,” she says, “but I don’t lie.”

She steps up to you. She embraces you.

It’s the first time you’ve been touched by anyone in a long time. You shudder. It’s the first time you realize that those actually _are_ emotions on her face. It was never your imagination. They have always been there.

She feels warm.

“I’m going to fix you,” Shokuhou says. “You, and this meddlesome, complicated brain of yours. It’ll take me a while, but just think of nothing, while I’ve got you. Shh. It’ll be okay, Shirai-san. Take a rest for a little bit of time. You’ve been through quite a bit, hm?”

“Don’t make me forget,” you croak. “Please don’t.”

“I won’t,” she says, and she sounds resigned. “Not that it would work, would it? You’ll never stop until you save her. You really love her. I see that now. How many times, more than I could’ve imagined… I should’ve known better than to underestimate you, Shirai-san.”

She makes you eat, she makes you sleep, and through whatever nonsense her power is, she makes sure you don’t have any nightmares. Dark thoughts come and go, but they aren’t as heavy as they have been in the past dozen timelines. You feel like yourself again. Not just Shirai Kuroko, the miserable failure, but Shirai Kuroko, the Judgement officer, the Level 5 teleporter, Misaka Mikoto’s best friend who _will_ save her. 

When was the last time you focused on the uncomplicated joy of being alive? Of looking outside at a beautiful day? Of spending time with people who care about you? You remember what makes Uiharu and Saten so special to you, and you promise that you’ll never forget to make sure they’re safe again.

Mikoto dies. You visit her grave for the first time in a long time. You bring flowers.

Sooner than you could have imagined, the day to start all over again comes upon you.

“Just don’t kill me when you see me again the next time,” Shokuhou smiles and for once you see it for what it is, a melancholic expression. “I said I’ll help you and I will. Okay? Two minds at it are better than one. I can make sure you stay sane.”

“You seem different than before,” you say.

“I’m trying to have a moment with you, Shirai-san,” she pouts. “Don’t ruin it.”

“But why,” you say. “I don’t understand.”

“I realized my old way of doing things,” Shokuhou starts, pauses. “Well, I don’t think you were appreciating it very much.”

You open your mouth to say something else. But you don’t know what to say. How useless the word _Sorry_ is and yet how many times you have said it and will continue to say it. To tell the truth, you still don’t fully understand. It still feels like you are waiting for the rug to be pulled from under you at any second. You stretch your mind back, try to interpret your previous interactions with Shokuhou in a different light.

“Thank you,” you murmur.

Back in time you go.


	5. 44, 45, 46, 50

**44.**

“Do you ever think about the particular detail that Accelerator is just human, too?” Shokuhou says.

You stare at her. The words do not entirely compute. Accelerator. Human?

“What I mean is,” she says, “perhaps you’re approaching it the wrong way? That maybe you don’t have to hurt him physically in order to incapacitate him and stop him from participating in the experiments?”

“Do you mean like I should wage psychological warfare?” you cock your head.

You think of your attempt to kill him with sleep deprivation. Though it ended poorly, you remember that it was the one time you actually made him annoyed. Most other times, he seems to fluctuate on an emotional spectrum consisting only of boredom and self-amusement and insanity.

“I was thinking more like, hm,” Shokuhou says. She puts a finger to her chin. “How do I say this in a way that won’t upset you?”

“Like…?”

“Perhaps you could talk him down.”

“Talk him down.”

“Using words, yes,” the corner of her mouth twitches.

“I thought you said you were going to try and help me,” you say.

“There are very few people who are actually bona-fide psychopaths. I have a good understanding of human psychology. Being who I am, I can verify this.”

“I swear, if you’re trying to argue with me that he’s just _misunderstood._ ”

You are in fact getting upset. Accelerator has killed your best friend at least forty times now. Each time was just as gruesome as the last. He is the cause of all your nightmares. He has hurt you more times than you can count. He is the reason you are repeating these months time and time again. You take a deep breath so as to not lose control. You have gotten so much more trigger happy than you used to be. 

Shokuhou holds up a remote. You nod, a brief jerk of your head, giving you her consent to use her powers to help calm you down.

“I don’t especially believe it myself,” she says, in her usual nonchalant way, “but if you haven’t tried such a thing yet. Using reason against him.”

“Fine,” you say, lips thinning. “Fine. I’ll give it a shot.”

Shokuhou Misaki helps you with the outline of the speech. You two are going to appeal to Accelerator’s nonexistent _better_ senses. Shokuhou tells you about the many dark sides of Academy City and the way they treat potential Level 5s, like little more than commodities. She explains to you there’s a reason you don’t typically become a Level 5 without having some serious trauma associated with it, and that as the one expected to become the number one ranked Level 5, Accelerator was surely subjected to more than the usual spigot of attention.

“He’s not a victim,” you say, shortly, “and neither are you.” Although the two of you may be on better terms now, you have never forgiven Shokuhou for wiping your memories in the second timeline, and for trying to do it in the third.

“You and Misaka-san have always been lucky,” Shokuhou says. She pauses, then has the wherewithal to backtrack. “At least until now.”

“I’m telling you, I don’t expect a single good thing to come out of this,” you mutter, considering the speech in your hands with strong distaste. You’re going to have to memorize the thing.

You brief the sisters on this new angle of attack. They are as skeptical as you are. This timeline you decide to go at Accelerator in the middle of the day, hoping that perhaps the good weather will lift his mood to better than it normally is and improve your chances of him listening to you. Ah, hell. This whole thing is a load of nonsense. 

Per the plan, Misaka 9965 doesn’t try to fight back against Accelerator and instead tries to talk to him like a person. She tells him things like her favorite color and explains to him why she believes cats are the most superior animals. This confuses him enough, you see, that he doesn’t immediately go on the offensive. You enter the scene and deliver the grand speech: _Look at her. She’s human. You’re human, too._

For a moment, he does nothing, and you can’t believe it. Have you gotten through to him after all? You think of the countless examples of Shokuhou’s unreadable expressions and try to make some kind of correlation with his. Then, he kills Misaka 9965. You try to stop him, and for your effort, he rips one of your arms off. 

“Did you really think something like that would work on me?” he sneers. You realize he’s not looking at you, but the body of the dead sister, lying on the ground. “Nice try. At least you meat bags are getting creative.”

“I knew that’s what you are,” you spit, unable to resist insulting him, “I knew it. An unrepentant _monster._ ”

“Shut the fuck up,” he says, sounding angry for once, “what would you _understand_ ,” and he takes your other arm off.

Shokuhou apologizes to you in the hospital by bringing you pastries from a local bakery, as if that will somehow make up for your missing arms. You can’t even eat them yourself so she has to feed them to you, which is a new level of humiliating.

“We have to stop meeting like this,” she says, referencing the fact that you have spent a disgusting amount of time in hospitals across timelines with her visiting you. “People are going to talk.”

“I hate you,” you mutter, but the words lack any real heat. For one second, just a flicker back there, you had seen Accelerator affected by your words. Shokuhou had been right.

You acknowledge this, that maybe he was once human. But whoever he was, you also acknowledge, is gone. It’s irrecoverable. You shouldn’t have to have to moralize to him for him to realize that what he’s doing is unforgivable. But perhaps you can take advantage of this somehow, after all. Distract him with it, however briefly.

Shokuhou manages to use her powers to convince most everyone in the hospital that what happened to you was some kind of car accident, and that prevents Mikoto from getting too angry on your behalf. Well, she is still really angry, to be fair, but seeing how you’re strangely unaffected by your limb loss somewhat calms her.

“Why didn’t you teleport out of the way?” Mikoto asks you.

“It surprised me too much?” you say.

Shokuhou asks you why you didn’t teleport out of the way of Accelerator’s attack, either. It’s a bit difficult to explain, but after countless fights, you’ve found the way Accelerator’s power interferes with yours goes beyond simple vector manipulation.

“In three dimensions his AIM field is a thin layer around him, sure,” you say, “but on the 11th-dimensional plane, it’s this whole web, like a spider’s, with him at the center. I don’t think he consciously realizes it himself, because normally the web is dormant and harmless, but the moment he decides to go on the offensive against me, the threads of the web suddenly become live like electric razor wire, and I have to maneuver myself very, very carefully around them. This isn’t the first time I’ve lost limbs, though not in this exact fashion.”

“I was wrong,” Shokuhou says, after a pause, and you double take, because what. “Talking him down may not have been a good plan.”

What. What is this. She feels guilty? “Well,” you say, awkwardly. “Um. Shouldn’t you have already had the information about his power with your power...?”

“I can’t see everything, Shirai-san,” Shokuhou says, reaching forward to poke you in the forehead. “At this point, there would simply be too much to process. I just see the most important parts.”

“I’ve been wondering something,” you say. “Who are you?”

“Getting existential, are we?” Shokuhou says, her eyes twinkling. “I’m Mental Out. The Queen of Tokiwadai. Your new best friend~”

After you finish rolling your eyes so hard you cause them strain, you say, “No, I mean, which Shokuhou Misaki are you? When… When you go through my mind, do you become like me, are you the Shokuhou from the original timeline?” Is she someone who has stopped you from killing yourself two times now?

There’s silence for a moment. 

“Do you want me to lie?” she says, quietly.

“No,” you say, feeling your stomach sink slightly.

“My power doesn’t work like that,” she says. “I’m still me. And just me. Every single one of the Shokuhou Misaki’s you met were different ones. But we all have the same good tastes, it seems, and it does give me perspective, seeing different versions of myself through your eyes. It informs me of how I should behave."

“Oh,” you say.

“Cheer up, Shirai-san,” she says. “I’m sure if you don’t kill her, the next me will be equally willing to assist you. And she might have some better ideas than me~”

Mikoto dies. You were expecting this timeline to be a failure given the state of your arms, but it doesn’t make it feel any less bad. As you prepare to make the teleport back in time, you see Shokuhou waving at you. She tells you good luck. You don’t know why you feel sorrow.

Maybe it’s the thought of all the timelines you’ve left behind, all the hers you’ve left behind and killed. You wonder if those timelines, without you, still exist. Are they parallel worlds, or do they get erased each time? Are they true resets?

Either way, you’ll still try again.

**45.**

“Let’s try again, hm?” Shokuhou says.

“Yes,” you breathe, tired but still going on.

**46.**

“Can you do a favor for me?” you ask.

“Of course,” Shokuhou says.

**50.**

All of a sudden, Shokuhou Misaki kisses you. The two of you are sitting at a cafe in the School Garden at her insistence, discussing plans in the pleasant afternoon sunshine, when suddenly she leans across the table and presses her lips to yours. It happens completely without warning. This is her, you think, trying to mess with your mind in a whole other way.

“What the fuck?” you sputter, blinking at her when she pulls away, across the table. A furious flush has started to work its way through your cheeks despite yourself, and you feel frazzled and loopy and slightly dizzy. “What the _fuck_?”

“I just wanted to see how it feels to kiss a time traveling warrior, like out of the movies,” Shokuhou says. “I mean, if you think about it, isn’t this whole thing so romantic? Misaka-san is _sooo_ lucky! She has no idea how lucky she is. If only I had someone who would be willing to do something like this for me!”

She bats her eyelashes at you. “You know I love her! And yet you still kissed me?” you hiss. You glance around at your surroundings, trying to see if anyone noticed, and god, everyone in the cafe is staring at the two of you, they definitely noticed. “What are you trying to play at? Whatever it is, it’s not funny. Knock it off.”

“Shirai-san, Shirai-san,” Shokuhou says, in a sing-song voice. “All of this talking and planning is making me depressed. Why don’t you learn to live a little? Why don’t you have a little bit of fun? We have the time, don’t we? Not everything has to be constantly so doom and gloom!”

She cocks her head, coyly tucks a piece of hair behind her ears, and smiles when she sees your eyes inadvertently drift southwards to her lips. You snap your gaze back up to her starry eyes, blush getting worse, trying to muster your anger once more. For some reason, it refuses to come as easily as it used to. You’re growing desensitized to her antics, you conclude, that’s what’s going on, too many timelines of working with her.

But seriously, why now? Shokuhou’s never done something like this before. You don’t get it. Just when you thought the two of you were getting to something like friends.

“You’re so small and short and cute,” Shokuhou continues, and if you didn’t know any better, you’d think she was rambling, “you’re so _adorable_ when you get that serious, no-nonsense look in your eyes _._ Hehe. Sometimes, I just want to squeeze you until you pop! My own little teleporter~!”

“Be serious,” you snap.

“Shirai-san,” she frowns, “I think you would know that I am more than serious by now.” And you feel slightly bad.

The truth is this timeline has been the best timeline you’ve ever had so far. It is the combination of all you could have ever hoped for, the best of your plans. You have destroyed the facilities involved in the project and temporarily delayed the sisters from being killed. You’ve broken out most of the current sisters and have them placed in secured safehouses, really secured ones. You have kept Mikoto in the dark without her being suspicious of what you’re doing. Shokuhou has been causing further interference in the researcher’s ranks with her powers. Psychological warfare has started on Accelerator to put him in the worst mental state possible. You send him dossiers on what he’s done, you explain to him, in excruciating detail, just what kind of _asshole_ he is, how the sisters are real people, for lack of a better word you try to bully him.

You’ve recruited every Level 5 besides Mikoto to team up against Accelerator. Dark Matter was surprisingly willing to cooperate for a one-time showdown and agreed to bring his team, SCHOOL. Meltdowner needed more convincing, but Shokuhou’s remote did the trick, and so ITEM is tagging along, too. Sogiita Gunha was game as soon as you explained to him the nature of the Level 6 Shift Project, declaring that someone like Accelerator didn’t have any guts. Even Aihana Etsu, the elusive 6th ranked Level 5, has agreed to give everyone a temporary tune-up with his ability to make espers into their ‘ideal selves’, although he won’t be participating in the fight directly.

You know for a fact that none of this would have been possible without Shokuhou’s help. She’s a smooth talker, with honey-sweet words, even without having to use her power. Now, the only thing to do is wait until the appointed date of the showdown. August 22nd. A date seeming of great karmic significance.

Until August 22nd happens, although you are anxious every day, there is not much you can really do. 

“Why don’t we date?” Shokuhou suggests. “You can introduce me to all your friends. I’d love to see the expression on Misaka-san’s face.”

“What, is your big secret that you like Mikoto? Is that why you keep wanting to help me?” you squint your eyes at Shokuhou. “Is this some roundabout way of trying to make her jealous?”

In the beginning you would have laughed at the notion of the idea of Shokuhou Misaki having a crush on Misaka Mikoto. But then again, apparently, Shokuhou has never actually hated you, so it’s entirely possible she has never actually hated Mikoto either. You’re starting to forget the reasons why, in the original timeline, the three of you had gotten off on such a wrong foot. Something to do with the factions in the school? Inherent Level 5 rivalry?

You try to picture Mikoto and Shokuhou romantically involved and your stomach does a lurch. Wow, for some reason, you really really do not like that image. Across the table, Shokuhou sighs so long and hard you think she might be exhaling brain cells.

The other possibility is… Psh. Nah. There’s no way.

“I can assure you that I definitely do not like Misaka-san,” Shokuhou grumbles. “While I have grown to have somewhat of an appreciation for her, to tell the truth, I don’t like her that much as a person at all.”

“I think you guys could actually get along pretty well,” you say. “Cutting out the dating part, I mean, why don’t the three of us actually try to spend some time together?”

If all goes well, then this will be the final, permanent timeline. And you do think there’s no ‘almost’, you and Shokuhou are friends now. Really. Mikoto is your best friend and the most important person to you. You’d want them to get along.

It sounds good on paper, but the actual meeting kind of goes sideways. The first thing Mikoto does is grab a fistful of Shokuhou’s collar and says, electricity crackling viciously around her forehead, _“You!”_

“Misaka-san,” Shokuhou says, in that particular tone of voice that sounds teasing and light as usual but which you are beginning to recognize is actually a grimace, “hello.”

“Mikoto—” you try to say.

“What are your intentions with Kuroko?” Mikoto demands. “Don’t mess with my friends, I’m warning you. I’ll fry you to pieces if you make one wrong move.”

“So brutish,” Shokuhou sneers. “Why does Shirai-san like you so much? It’s definitely not your childish figure, nope, nope.”

Mikoto turns an alarming shade of red. “W-Well, who’d want things like _those_? They’re lumps!” You’re in public. Someone snaps a picture of the three of you and a vein in your forehead throbs. 

“We are here to go shopping today,” you enunciate, and the words sound so alien even as you say them, but you say them anyway. “We will have a good time.”

Shokuhou whispers something in Mikoto’s ear that causes her to huff and let go of her collar. The both of them brush themselves off like they have touched something particularly distasteful.

“I still don’t like you,” Mikoto says. “I don’t trust you, for one second.”

“Glad we share those feelings, Misaka-san,” Shokuhou says.

It turns out that there is an interesting rumor going around, owing to Shokuhou’s actions in that cafe (the, ahem, the kiss), that the two of you are actually dating. Mikoto was being an overprotective friend, trying to look out for you. When you and Mikoto have a brief moment to yourselves, you’re quick to clarify the situation. “No, we’re just friends,” you say.

“She’s been flirting with you this whole time,” Mikoto grumbles. “I feel like I’ve been third-wheeling.”

“Uh,” you say. “What?”

Mikoto looks at you. “I thought I was supposed to be the dense one, Kuroko,” she says, slowly.

“I think you’re the one she actually likes,” you suggest again, because who wouldn’t like Mikoto, honestly. She’s really one of the best people you know.

“You might just be projecting your own feelings for me,” Mikoto says. Then she realizes what she’s said, and the both of you fall a little bit quiet. Considering the background of everything that’s happening, you haven’t been thinking too much about it, but it’s true, there’s still this... this weird relationship limbo you have going on with Mikoto, even now.

“Let’s not leave her alone before she brainwashes too many people,” Mikoto says, and although you know by now that’s something Shokuhou doesn’t actually do with any carelessness, you don’t protest, just briefly glad there’s an excuse to pass the uncomfortable air.

At the end of the whole shopping affair, Shokuhou ends up kissing you on the cheek. She and Mikoto go to exchange goodbyes, and Shokuhou leans in as well, and you think with some disappointment, _Aha, see, I knew it,_ but all Shokuhou does is whisper something in Mikoto’s ear again that makes your best friend stiffen.

“Have a safe trip home~” Shokuhou says. Then she leaves. It’s actually not that bad of a joke. Her, telling two Level 5s to stay safe.

It’s like that distant afternoon from the original timeline. The two of you walking down the street. Mikoto raises her arms and does the same lazy cat stretch.

“I still think you can find someone ten times better,” Mikoto says.

“She’s not as bad as you make her sound out,” you instinctively defend.

“As long as it’s what makes you happy, I suppose,” Mikoto says. She smiles, and you can’t tell what kind of smile it’s supposed to be. “Kuroko. I will beat her up for you, you know that. Just say the word.”

You laugh. You feel so relieved for some reason. After a moment, Mikoto joins you with a chuckle. She runs a hand through her hair and glances at you from the corner of her eye, fondly.

“I can’t believe how dense you actually are,” she says. “It’s making me see you in a whole new light.”

“Says _you_ ,” you say.

“Says me,” she agrees.

* * *

The switchyard in District 17, again. You’re cradling her body against yours, again. Except it’s not Mikoto this time, it’s Shokuhou, who's clinging to life barely.

“Hah…” she gasps for breath. Her lips are painted a bright, rosy red from her blood. “I’ve made a real mess for the next ‘me’, I can already tell… This is so unbecoming.”

“I don’t understand you,” you say. “I don’t understand you at all.”

“How did you deal with this so many times,” Shokuhou says. “You make it seem like it’s nothing. You’re so stoic. Ah, but dying _hurts_ …”

She makes a slightly high-pitched, keening sound, and it hurts you to see her suffering. Someone like her, a delicate flower, shouldn’t suffer. “You’re not dying,” you say.

“Shirai-san,” she says. The extent of her wounds… Even if you got her to a hospital this exact moment, there’s nothing anyone could do.

And you had been so optimistic for this timeline. Your mind turns over the details of how everything had gone so wrong, almost unable to believe it. It had started off so promising. You could tell, you had forced Accelerator to take you seriously. Maybe that was why you failed again. Because for the first time, he took you seriously. Somehow, he knew it was you who had organized this whole thing.

After he had obliterated Kakine Teitoku, he had shot past Sogiita Gunha and Mugino Shizuri, headed straight for _you_ . And then Shokuhou had done the most cliche thing in the world, you can’t figure out for the life of you why you had allowed her to be so close to the battlefield in the first place, she’s not a frontline fighter, you shouldn’t have told her about Accelerator’s 11th-dimensional spider web effect, that hit which should have been meant for _you—_

Meltdowner had broken free from Shokuhou’s control after that and had promptly turned into an unregulated loose cannon. Gunha had been distracted, trying to deal with her. The rest of SCHOOL and ITEM had fled like rats.

“Why did you do it?” you say.

“Well,” she says. “You’re the only one who can go back in time, right? So it makes sense… You’re the most important person here, right? You have to live.”

“Why did you kiss me?” you say.

There’s silence for a moment.

“Why does anyone kiss anyone,” her voice comes out as little more than a reedy whisper. “Because I wanted to. Because I’ve always thought you were beautiful, Shirai-san. Because I like you. Does there have to be any more to it?”

A tear drips off your chin without you noticing it.

“Don’t cry, Shirai-san,” Shokuhou says. “I’ll… I’ll see you again. It just might not be… the exact same… me...“

She smiles, her flat, starry-eyed smile.

Shokuhou dies.

You have a month left to wait before you can reset. Even the best possible timeline has turned out like this. The sense of loss and hopelessness is horrible, and Shokuhou’s not there to take them away with a flick of her remote and tell you to keep your chin up. You don’t know when you came to depend upon her so much.

Mikoto doesn’t know anything about the battle save for what comes in from the news. Dark Matter is dead. Meltdowner and Gunha are dead. Shokuhou is dead. Who knows what the fuck Aihana Etsu is up to. The sisters remove themselves from the safehouses and return to the experiments of their own free will, thanking you for trying.

This is madness.

It’s pure, utter madness.

The closed casket funeral. You don’t cry anymore. You bring flowers to her grave.

“Mikoto,” you say. “Do you love me?”

“Of course I do,” she says, immediately.

“You know what I mean,” you say. “The way I love you. Please be honest.”

“I don’t know,” she bows her head. “I’m sorry.”

“Okay,” you say, closing your eyes. “Okay.”

“I just need a bit more time,” she says, like always. “If you’re willing to wait.”

You have been waiting for forever. You know you might wait for another forever. 

“I’m sorry,” she says again, and you know she’s apologizing for something else as well, the kind of _I’m sorry_ you say as in _I’m sorry that this happened to you, I’m sorry for your loss_. She still thinks you and Shokuhou had some kind of star-crossed lovers thing going on.

And then, in what must be the greatest rubbing of salt in the wound, _Mikoto still dies_. Accelerator’s been hunting you down, apparently, you being the only one who escaped from that bloody massacre that night. She dies trying to protect you. Just like Shokuhou.

It's so unfair.

The only thing you can do is to teleport into the past again.


	6. 51, 52, 53

**51.**

It’s been a while since you spent a timeline in a depressive funk, doing nothing.

Maybe you really should give up. You’ve thought of giving up… what? Three times now?

Is there anything else you can do? Is there anything else left for you to do?

You have an idea. It’s such a crazy idea, it just might work. Maybe it was the only way all along. You’ll have to kill Accelerator before he becomes an unkillable monster. You’ll have to travel far, far into the past. Maybe it’s a testament to how much you’ve fallen that the idea of killing what must be then an innocent child doesn’t disturb you anymore. It’s for the greater good.

When you go back in time, it always brings you to the point in the alleyway, the lazy summer afternoon. But perhaps that’s because you always teleport back on the same day, the very first day your power allows you to travel back in time. What precisely are the rules of negative time? You should have experimented with them more. What if it accumulates?

You wait one extra day this time around, and when you teleport back in time, you find yourself one extra day early. A whole new day that you haven’t experienced before happens before the alleyway and the gun.

This is it, you think.

**52.**

It’s going to be a fine balance. You’ll be in a child’s body, too. You think eight years old is a good age for you. You were a Level 2 then, and according to your research, Accelerator was a Level 3. Surely he couldn’t have been capable of reflecting 11-dimensional vectors at that level, but you would still have enough fine control to teleport something into his brain. The problem would simply be a matter of tracking him down.

You’ll probably be imprisoned for life when you kill him, you realize. Everyone will think you killed a child for no reason. But you’re willing to go through with it. Prison, even death, is a small price to pay for the relief of knowing everyone you care about won’t have to die anymore.

It also means you have to spend an extra five years in this timeline, accumulating enough time to go back that far.

Mikoto dies. You study Shokuhou Misaki.

She’s a bit of a loner, you realize. She has her faction, of course, but save for that tall violet-haired girl, she doesn’t really talk to any of them. She spends most of her time alone, thinking about who knows what. She catches you watching her more than once (she’s always been watching you as well, you realize), but you always teleport yourself away before she can approach you and use her Mental Out power on you.

You think if she knew your plan, she’d surely try to stop you. You talk to the violet-haired girl to try to get a better grasp of her personality. It turns out Shokuhou’s remarkably kind, just like Mikoto, only she doesn't show it the same way. And you already know she’s brave. And she is beautiful. Anyone would have to be blind not to see it.

It might be your own weakness, the thought of spending five entire years all on your own, that allows her to ambush you anyway.

“Shirai-san,” Shokuhou murmurs. The remote slips from her hand. A gust of wind sends her long, blonde hair fluttering. “You’re right. I do want to stop you.”

“But it’ll work,” you say. “It will.”

“I just wanted to save _you_ ,” she says. “All those timelines. Every me. I just wanted to save you. You were my most important person. How is this fair? Please explain it to me precisely. Everyone gets their happy ending except for you?”

It’s the first time that you see her break down and cry. She’s always appeared so strong. You don’t know what to say. You tell her that it’ll be okay.

She kisses you again.

You let her. Maybe you kiss her back.

“Not here,” she says when it starts to grow a little too intense. You teleport the two of you to her dorm and then the two of you are making for the bed, stumbling, fumbling at each other’s clothes.

You take off her gloves. You peel them back slowly, revealing her soft, delicate skin. You kiss her fingers one by one. She’s unblemished, unscarred, unlike your own body no matter how it may appear on the outside. You’ve forgotten how many of your bones you’ve broken, how many limbs you’ve lost.

You make love to her. “I love you,” she gasps into your ear as she comes undone. 

This is Shokuhou Misaki, you think. This is her. A girl who maybe loves too much, just like you. Ah. Before you know it, you’re crying as well. She brushes the tears away. How could you have ever hated someone like her?

Afterwards, on the same bed, in her room. “Am I the first person you’ve ever loved?” you whisper.

There is a long moment of silence.

“No.”

“No?”

“Why don’t you just hold me,” Misaki murmurs. “It feels nice like this.”

“I want to know about her.”

Another moment of silence.

“Not her,” Misaki says. “Him.”

“Okay,” you say. You shift slightly. “Well. What was he like? What happened to him? You’ve never talked about it before.”

“He died because of me,” she says.

“Oh,” you say. You swallow. You press a kiss to the back of her neck.

You say, “Is that why you had so much trouble being straightforward in those earlier timelines with me? It was your defense mechanism against getting hurt again?” 

She turns around and faces you. She takes your hand in hers and raises it to her face and her mouth lingers there, on your palm. There’s nothing sexual about the gesture. Her eyes are closed.

“I love you,” Misaki says again. “I really do. I’ve always loved you. The day I first met you in Tokiwadai, you captivated me. The more I learn about you the more I think I love you.”

“I think I might love you, too,” you admit.

She opens her eyes and looks at you, in the moonlight. She just looks.

You both know there’s no happy ending for this.

“But you love Misaka-san more,” she says finally.

“It’s not like that,” you say. “Not _more_. It’s just different. It’s… It’s like, if that boy who died, if he was still alive, if you had a chance to save him—”

“I would still choose you,” she says.

That’s like a punch straight to your gut. 

What can you even say to that?

She turns around.

“Just hold me, please,” she says. “Just for tonight. Let me be selfish.”

“Misaki,” you say, helplessly.

“Please,” she says.

* * *

The morning comes. The bed is warm with Misaki’s presence.

You think of waking up like this again and again, day after day, with someone who adores you, who loves you with an aching intensity you don’t know what to make of. 

You think of her original words, from a long time ago. The process of letting go and moving on.

You’ll always love Mikoto. There’s no question about it. But Misaki is right here, and she’s real. When you make your decision, you feel at peace. You’ll accept this love. You’ll accept her feelings, and your own. You won’t run away from them.

The two of you sit down, to eat breakfast together. You open your mouth, to tell her your decision.

“I’ve been thinking,” Misaki says. “About that boy. And what you said about if I had a chance to save him.”

You close your mouth.

She continues, “I realized something, that you don’t have to go back as far as Accelerator’s childhood. That you don’t have to kill anyone. I think if you can manage just an extra year, it might work. If you return to the previous summer, when I first met Kamijou-kun, and make sure he doesn’t die. I know this will be me asking a lot from you. You might think that I’m lying and that it all sounds too good to be true. Or you might think this was what I was secretly after all along, that I was just using you for him. I promise you, that was never my intention. My feelings for you are genuine.”

“I trust you,” you say. You do. You ask, “Why do you think ‘it might work’ if I go back to that time and save his life?”

“The reason I was drawn to him in the first place,” Misaki says. “He had this mysterious power in his right hand. It was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. He could negate my powers with it.”

“Negate…?”

“And not just mine,” Misaki says. “Anybody’s. No matter what level, what kind of power it was. If his right hand touched it, it would fall right apart. It wasn’t an esper power, it was something outside of it. A miracle, if you will.”

The pieces click together. Misaki’s right. It does sound like she has to be lying. Something like this must be too good to be true. But you know Misaki, and Misaki doesn’t lie. 

“You think he could defeat Accelerator,” you say.

“Just like you, he was a person who believed in justice, in saving others, in being a good person,” she says, softly. This version of her, hair still mussed from sleep, waiting for your answer. “I know that if he was still alive today, if he knew what was happening, he wouldn’t do nothing.”

“Kamijou,” you say his name, slowly, so that you can remember it. You nod. “I think it’s worth a shot. What do I have to lose? If he’s that important to you, I’ll save him.”

Time starts to pass. The year begins to count down. It’s hard to live with the guilt, the feeling like you don’t deserve any of this. The sisters are still all dying in the background, one by one. Despite your Judgement work, you are so aware of how the city around you is dirty and rotten. But at the same time, it’s so… peaceful, being with Misaki. You wonder what it could have been like if you decided to give her a chance earlier.

She kisses your guilt away.

You realize you do love her.

For the first time, that endlessly repeated summer ends. Fall comes in a shower of brilliant red leaves. A winter of drifting snow. A spring of rain. And then summer again, a new summer, and before you know it, it’s the day for you to go.

It’s not the first time your resolve falters, but it’s the first time it happens like this.

“I’m offering you _me_ ,” you say. “Everything that I am. Tell me to stay, and I’ll stay. I won’t go.”

“Shirai-san,” the way she says your name, gently, her special way. She touches your cheek. “You have to. You’re not that selfish.”

“But I am,” you say. “A year isn’t enough.”

“Misaka Mikoto is waiting for you,” she says. “And Kamijou Touma, and the me of the past. This doesn’t have to be the end of us.”

“It won’t be the same.”

“It’s not a question of if I’ll fall in love with you again.”

Your heart clenches painfully in your chest. You nod. You’ll get that happy ending, you swear on it. For everyone.

You say goodbye to Shokuhou Misaki.

Once more. One last time.

**53.**

The way Kamijou Touma died is this. There was once a gang of espers who hated Level 5s. They believed Level 5s to be the reason they could not advance their own levels, so they took to hatching plots to kill them as revenge. Almost like you trying to kill Accelerator but a lot less righteous.

Kamijou and Misaki had been friends for a while that summer when the gang decided to finally attack her. They ambushed the two of them in an alleyway with the aid of these metal death machines that Misaki was unable to take control of. They tried to recruit Kamijou to their side but he refused and steadfastly defended Misaki. As a result the gang had beaten him mercilessly to death.

By the time emergency medical services had arrived, it was already too late.

Your only job this timeline: save Kamijou Touma. This is the summer that you joined Judgement. It feels nostalgic to relive some of it, memories you had all but forgotten.

You try to have Anti-Skill and Judgement crack down on the gang early, but at this point in time, they actually haven’t done anything violent yet, so there’s no jurisdiction. Fine, you think, you’ll do this the hands-on way. You’re a Level 4 right now, your power is still perfectly respectable. It’s good enough. You keep an eye on the date and place to be at.

When the gang ambushes Kamijou and Misaki this time, you’re there to stop them. You flash your green armband in an attempt to get them to stand down. They do not.

“You should resent her, too!” the leader of the gang cries out. “It’s because of her that we’re like this!”

“You’re being hypocrites,” you say, cracking your knuckles as you prepare for delivering an old-fashioned beatdown. “You don’t know at all the kind of person she is—if you did, then you would realize you’re all just cowards trying to justify your own weakness.”

“Who are you?” this younger Shokuhou Misaki says. You would teleport her somewhere to safety, but your range is rather limited right now, and you don’t want to leave her on her own.

Kamijou helps you try to fight off the gang. All things considered, you think you actually quite like this tall spiky-haired boy. He’s only a Level 0 and that only makes his willpower all the more admirable. His right hand, you see, really is something else. It blocks fireballs, wind strikes, mini bombs, like they’re nothing. You really think he can beat Accelerator, if with a little bit of help. You think of your near perfect timeline plus Kamijou and are absolutely certain, for the first time, that this is the one where you finally win.

There’s about thirty members of the gang, some Level 0s as well, but mostly espers with definable powers. You whittle away their forces little by little. At one point you run out of your favorite white spikes and you’re forced to get a little more up close and personal. You body flip people, you break ankles, you smash machines one into another. Misaki can’t control the machines, but she does a brilliant job of sowing chaos by turning their forces against one another. You make sure Kamijou stays close to you.

It’s almost done. Just a few more now. Then, the sound of someone cocking a gun. It’s like it happens in slow motion, and you can almost hear a remnant of Uiharu’s voice shouting in your ear. The déjà vu is ridiculous. You don’t think, you just react, you turn and lunge and shove Kamijou out of the way, trying to teleport the both of you as you do so.

Your power fails. Oh, that's right. His right hand. A muzzle flash.

So then, you’ve done the same cliche thing which Misaki did for you. You’re only Level 4. You’ve gotten so used to having near instantaneous teleportations, but even at your best when you were Level 4, you were not fast enough to dodge a bullet. The bullet hits you right in the brain. It plows through your skull and your gray matter and exits from a hole in the back of your head, trailing bone and gore and destruction. You crumple to the ground and would be instantly dead if not for the fact of Misaki’s power. She’s on you right away, doing something odd to staunch the bleeding, to reroute the tissues of your brain to ensure sufficient blood flow, with Mental Out.

“ _Shirai-san_ ,” she groans, her hands on your head. Blood starts to drip out of her nose from over-exertion of her power. “No, no, no—”

“Misaki,” you say. “You remember.”

Kamijou shouts furiously, the thuds of his right hand making sharp impacts. He’s gotten the last member of the gang. You look up above, at the clear blue sky, feeling yourself starting to slip away.

You’ve been fighting for so, so long… 

But you’ve done it. You’ve saved Kamijou. You’ve saved Misaki. You’ve saved Mikoto. The sisters. You're sure of it. You can’t help the relieved smile that comes over your face. 

“Stay with me,” she asks of you.

“It was all worth it,” you say. “Please live a good life.”

You close your eyes. The darkness is comforting. It is an old friend that has beckoned for you to come to it for so many times now.

And then you’re gone.

_(Your name is Shirai Kuroko. You are thirteen years old and attend the prestigious Tokiwadai Middle School in the School Garden. Of the 2.3 million inhabitants in Academy City, you are one of eight Level 5 espers, the strongest supernatural ability users in the city, albeit by and far you are ranked as the weakest of the eight. Your best friend is Misaka Mikoto, also a Level 5 esper, the 3rd ranked known widely as Railgun._

_You’re—_

_…_

_…_

_…)_


	7. 1

**1.**

There are two ‘first times’ where you met Shirai Kuroko. The first one, properly speaking, happened the summer of your first year at Tokiwadai, when she appeared out of nowhere like some kind of guardian angel and saved you and Kamijou’s lives from that gang. That meeting ended with her suffering such complete memory loss at the hands of a traumatic brain injury, the kind of memory loss of which not even your Mental Out could have inflicted nor healed, that she forgot everything. About who she was, who you were, what she had done. In the hospital afterwards when she had finally woken up she had already become a total blank slate. At the time she had gotten shot, you had not been sure exactly who she was to you, just that you had gotten an impression of her name, the sharp all-consuming panic taking control of you as you witnessed her starting to fall. You had never tried to use your power in that way before, trying to physically hold together someone’s brain, and although you managed to keep her alive long enough for her to reach the hospital, for them to perform the emergency reconstructive surgery, you had had a distinct sense the whole time, what you were seeing, leaking out of her head, were the memories of things that could never be recovered. You had looked at the blood covering your hands, her blood, pieces of her brain, the things that made her who she was, trembling all the while. 

It was only later, as you went through the memories that you had instinctively retrieved from her when you were trying to keep her alive, and from those little pieces stuck to your hands, that you began to realize the significance of what she had done and what had been lost.

“Don’t feel guilty,” you told Kamijou. “I’m glad you’re alive.”

Maybe you should have stayed with her. You should’ve been her friend. You should’ve tried to start it all over. But the first time she had looked at you, with those completely blank eyes, asking you who you were, something in you had crumbled. Worse still was the last memory that she had had before she disappeared: of Misaka Mikoto. From the beginning to the end, it became clear, her heart had always stayed true. You were always only the interloper, the distant satellite orbiting the earth, who had dared to try to insert yourself in someone else’s love story. Misaka Mikoto is bad at being honest with herself, but she possesses some ineffable something that you’ll never have. Doesn’t it feel like it was your fault? Isn't it your fault? You tempted her. You made her stray. That’s why she was punished. Fate is a cruel mistress.

You remember, you kind of gaffed that second ‘first meeting’ as well, in the memory of another time.

It was the start of your second year at Tokiwadai. You had been waging a cold war with Railgun for some time now. The two of you, due to what you like to think of as irreconcilable differences, had never been able to stand each other. She thought of you as a snake. You thought of her as an idiot. The news came through the grapevine of a new student joining the school, and not just any ordinary new student, but another Level 5.

Railgun, like the hardheaded fool she was, took this as a challenge. You had soured her perceptions of what other Level 5s could be like, and she had in turn soured yours. Misaka Mikoto was immune to your power due to her ability to manipulate her own bioelectricity, but you were fairly certain that this new Level 5 would not be immune. And wouldn’t it be nice, to have someone like that as yours? Who cared about an Electromaster like Railgun, when Electromasters were a dime a dozen. A teleporter, on the other hand, now that was a rare and exciting ability.

It was set up so that you and Railgun would meet up with her at the same time to show her around the school campus. That meant you couldn’t use Mental Out on her right away, lest Misaka get offended, not that you were planning on using it on her right away: the challenge was half the fun, after all. You were prepared to make the best introduction and blow Railgun’s first impression out of the water, which shouldn’t have been too difficult. But you had immediately been eclipsed. It turned out that this Shirai Kuroko person and Misaka Mikoto had already had some old history. Something to do with a vending machine and stolen juice, her being a Judgement officer. You had stood on the sidelines, watching them argue and squabble. You should have felt triumphant that they were getting off on the wrong foot, but at the same time, you had the strangest sensation somehow you were missing out on something very simple but very important.

Finally, she seemed to remember that you were still there. “Charmed,” Shirai said, extending her hand as she turned towards you. You stared at her. She stared back with her ruby red eyes. Then, after a second you took her hand. She smiled at you, and it seemed to you her whole countenance changed, became more open, and you saw even the infamously tsundere Misaka Mikoto pause. That had immediately sparked your competitive spirit, if you were to be honest.

Shirai had a firm grip, you remember. You also remember thinking already that she was so unbelievably cute. You had never wanted someone to be yours so badly. At the time, you were still thinking in terms of your clique, as your puppet, as someone who would only serve and adore you.

You discovered that Shirai Kuroko was the opposite of Misaka Mikoto in many ways. She had many of the properties of the stereotypical Tokiwadai lady, she respected rules and punctuality with reverence, she was intelligent and diligent with her studies, when she set out to do something, she set out to do it perfectly, with amazing focus. She was the eighth ranked Level 5, but you quickly realized that that had to be a mistake. The precision of her teleportation, the speed, at the very least, she had to outclass you and Railgun. And yet she was so humble, too.

Railgun beat her down in spars because Shirai had enough morality not to instantly end the fights by teleporting objects into Railgun’s body. You set to win her over with gifts and offers of service and power. For some reason, these overtures seemed to disconcert her. You witnessed her once open expression become gradually more and more closed off, until at last distrustful. You were convinced that this was Misaka Mikoto poisoning her against you on purpose. Then, finally, realizing you had no other choice, not unless you wanted to lose her, you used your Mental Out to control her. For a week you had her under your thumb and every whim, and although it should have been a triumphant feeling, it felt entirely empty.

Misaka Mikoto threatened to electrocute you until you begged for mercy if you didn’t let her go. You let her go. And that was that. You planned to write the experience off as a disappointment. They became fast friends. She put in a request to move into the same dorm as Railgun, the same room. And so you became her enemy.

You never hated her, though. This much is true. Back then, you just didn’t have the proper way to express how you felt, the desire to have her be yours and yours alone, the pain at the prospect of being cut off from her. Later you figured out it was that so-called feeling of ‘love’, the same feeling you had felt for a spiky-haired boy who had died to save you. But by then it was already far too late. How could you have apologized the right way? How useless the word _Sorry_ is.

You know you’re just making excuses for yourself. You should have at least tried to say it. Well, you never pretended you were a good person. That first timeline, after Misaka Mikoto died, you had still been selfishly thinking about yourself. You thought it was a good chance to start to get close to her. You could be there for her in her time of need. You had a conniving plan, of gradually convincing her to fall for you, to make her realize that she was better off without Railgun anyways.

Then she tried to kill herself. You had barely managed to click your remote in time. For many timelines after that, things between you and her had gotten worse and worse, to the point that she decided it was better off to kill _you_. You think of that sometimes, in your darkest moments, that that must be your greatest shame. How awful you must have been to drive someone pure and good like Shirai Kuroko to want to kill you, how you were the first step in a chain of her getting close to losing herself. It was probably that realization that had motivated you to really, really try to change, to try to really become good. There was no room for being selfish anymore. No talking in riddles, playing games, you had to be sincere.

You tried to make yourself see what was so appealing about Misaka Mikoto and you found that you could see it. Because fundamentally, despite her flaws, Misaka Mikoto was a good person. You started to want Misaka Mikoto to live not just for Shirai’s sake but for her own sake, too. You felt for her clones, who sometimes reminded you of an old childhood friend you hadn’t thought of in a long time. Timeline after timeline you witnessed them die, Railgun die, and then, when at last the idea of Kamijou came to you, there was no way you could remain silent.

When Shirai enters Tokiwadai in this new timeline, you realize she is still a Level 4. Not only is she still a Level 4, but her power has significantly deteriorated from that summer when saved you and Kamijou. You steal her student reports. You look at the numbers of her System Scans. You find out that due to the brain damage she sustained, not only had she lost all her memories, it is impossible for her to ever reach Level 5 like she once did. Those miraculous things, the mere concept of time travel, have already become fiction. This world, whatever happens in it, good or bad, is the end all. Her long journey has at last come to a permanent stop.

She really gave up everything.

You think of transferring what you remember to her using your powers. But you decide that with her, you’ve committed yourself to never being selfish again. You discover that she’s… different now. Shirai had always had strong desires and emotions, but her self-control had never been anything short of impeccable. It was always her who was the serious, level-headed one, the rule-follower, the dedicated, where Railgun was the more light-hearted and childish. Of course, Shirai still is all those things. But just as much as Railgun, she’s childish now, too. Sometimes, you can’t believe this girl who throws herself over Misaka Mikoto and fawns over her like a fanatic and calls her ‘Onee-sama’ is the same one who once tried to burn down an entire city for her. The same girl who killed Level 5s without flinching and challenged Accelerator time and time again to be beaten down time and time again, only to stand back up, even if occasionally she needed your help to properly stand back up, the same girl who was once a Level 5 herself. The same girl who once kissed you so tenderly and held you in her arms.

It’s not bad. Just different. Different doesn’t have to be bad. After all, Shirai seems so much _happier_ the way she is now. She had rarely if ever been happy back then. If she’s happy, that ought to be good enough for you. To transfer those memories to her would be to destroy her happiness. To get close to her would only cause her needless pain. Even if Misaka Mikoto doesn’t fully deserve someone like her, you have to admit, there might be something like ‘destiny’ drawing the two of them toward one another.

You’re just a little bit lonely. You thought that you would at least always have Kamijou, and he was the only one who you could trust and who understood you, but then an accident erased all of his memories as well. The irony of everything would have made you laugh if it didn’t want to make you cry so much. Not for the first time you had wished your ability was anything besides Mental Out, if it could only be the opposite, perhaps.

August 22nd comes and passes. It’s easy enough to take brief control of one of Railgun’s clones, temporarily cut her off from the network, and nudge her into Kamijou’s way to make sure he becomes involved. Misaka Mikoto lives. Kamijou lives. The experiments stop. The clones live. It’s the best case scenario. You feel a huge burden lifted off your chest as you realize that the dream really did come true, after all this time.

You’re still alone. You keep a careful distance from Shirai although you are never too far. You intervene only in the tiniest ways, afraid to make any too overt gestures. She lives on in blissful unawareness.

Then, somehow, she almost dies. She ends up in the hospital again, and you hear the news. Something to do with the remnant of the Tree Diagram, another teleporter called Musujime Awaki, and a gun... There’s some kind of bad joke to be had here, you think, wryly, on the way up the hospital elevator, if only she knew how many times you’ve done this before, like a wife waiting for her husband to come back from war. You’re standing before her hospital room before you even know what you’re doing, why you’re there. You know you shouldn’t. But old habits die hard. Just one meeting, one goodbye, you promise yourself, that’ll be enough to tide you over for good. You need to see for yourself that she’s okay.

Misaka Mikoto glares at you as she comes out.

“What do you want?” she says.

You’re unphased. “Can’t I just be a concerned classmate?” you say.

“Don’t give me that,” she says. “Kuroko’s still resting. She’s been through a lot. This isn’t the time to be messing with her.”

“I’m not trying to mess with anyone,” you say. “Truly.”

“Yeah, right,” she scoffs. “Who’d believe that."

“Here,” you say, handing over your purse. “All my remotes are in there, so take good care of it, okay?”

She narrows her eyes at you. You give her your best winning smile. It’s never ever worked on her, but to your surprise, she blinks, then huffs, and turns away.

“I’ll be waiting in the lobby with these,” she calls as she heads down the hall. “Do anything to her, and I’ll fry you!”

“I wouldn’t expect anything less of you, Misaka-san!” you call back.

You watch Railgun until she’s completely gone. Who knows. Maybe Shirai was right, and the two of you can be friends after all, in this world where you can all live. If you’re really going to be doing this, though, then you’ve delayed it long enough. It’s the moment of truth. You enter the room. 

The windows are open, and there’s the pleasant scent of flowers in the air. Shirai is sitting on the bed, and she’s looking at some kind of photo album, but she instantly snaps it shut when she senses your presence. She stuffs it under the blanket with the slightest hints of a blush and you fight the urge to laugh. Having observed enough of her antics with her ‘Onee-sama’, you have the feeling you know what that was.

Yes, she really is different now, and that doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing.

“...Shokuhou Misaki?” she says. Shirai’s voice is wary, if not polite and disinterested. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

“Do I really have to have ulterior motives? I heard the bad news,” you say. “I wanted to check up on my underclassman.”

“Ah,” she says. “I see. Well, you can see that I am alive and well.”

“Mm,” you say. You sit down on the chair beside her bed. “You know, you ought to refrain yourself from getting shot so much. It’s a bad habit of yours, isn’t it?”

“That’s…” she trails off. Shirai Kuroko looks at you for a long, long time. She touches her head. You see her thumb, tracing the faint circle of the scar there. “Well, I suppose it is a bad habit, but I don’t know how you could…”

“We knew each other from before,” you say, in one breath. “That about squares the situation.”

That interests her. She perks right up. Drat. You told yourself you would only limit yourself to this one interaction, but you can already feel your resistance breaking. You liked her a lot. No. You loved her. Let’s not start lying to yourself.

“If that’s the case, then why didn’t you ever talk to me?” she says. “Why now? It’s been more than a year.”

“I was a little bit afraid, I think,” you say. “I mean. We didn’t have the opportunity to get to know each other as well as we wanted. And there were other things. It was complicated. I’m… sorry.”

“I would have still wanted to know,” she says, earnestly. “What an odd thought. I never would have considered such a thing in a million years, me knowing Shokuhou Misaki. I don’t know whether or not to believe you.”

“It’s the truth.”

“I always wondered. What kind of person was I like before I lost my memories? Were we friends?” she says. 

“Something like that,” you say.

“How did we meet?” Shirai says. She’s fully invested now. “Why did we meet?”

“The first time it was through Judgement. You helped me out quite a bit. The second first time, it was something related to a school function,” you say. At her puzzled expression, you say, “I might explain it to you some other time. As for the why… I don’t know. Depending on how you see it, it was either a fortune or misfortune.”

She wears a thoughtful expression. “I’ve always had this feeling…”

“A feeling? Of what?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Just a feeling, one I couldn’t place. I don’t really know why I’m telling you. It’s odd. I think I do believe what you’re saying.” She leans back in the bed, looking at the ceiling. “Déjà vu! That’s part of it. And yet there’s something else I can’t particularly identify…”

“Shirai-san. Do you hate me?”

She seems bewildered. “Pardon?” she says. “I can’t say I’ve ever given the topic much thought, Shokuhou-san, but the answer is no.”

You hum. You’re glad. “Why don’t you call me Misaki?” you say.

She blinks, long and slow, then she offers you a tentative smile. An open, searching expression. “Doesn’t that seem a bit too familiar?”

“We have time to get to know each other again,” you say. “All the time in the world.”

You talk for a little while longer before you decide it’s about time you should leave. Surely Railgun must be growing a little agitated, and you can tell that Shirai is growing tired, too, with her wound she still has to recover from, and eventually, she falls asleep. You won’t mess this up. This is your resolve. You’ll make sure she lives the life she deserves. If you've learned one thing, it's that happy endings have to be earned. You think of that wonderful year she spent with the luckiest version of you and let it nourish a warmth in your chest. You go to close the windows so she doesn’t catch a chill. 

Outside, you see Academy City turning in the colors of the burgeoning fall. One summer has ended, and there are many more of them to come.

_Fin._

**Author's Note:**

> I definitely shouldn’t have written this considering the other fics I’m supposed to be working on but I couldn’t resist. I used to watch railgun in middle school and I saw that the new season had come out in 2020 and watched a little and instantly got hit with a giant ball of nostalgia. What appealed to me most about Kuroko’s character was her dedication and loyalty and her strong sense of justice, especially when she was in serious mode and doing all kinds of cool teleporting things. So I decided to try for a more serious pmmm-style story and taking those traits to the maximum. 
> 
> It’s been a lot of fun revisiting this fandom and seeing what’s been going on. I hope you guys enjoyed reading :)


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